Shortly after my stroke, my mom (who was in many ways more traumatized by it than I was) mentioned that she was trying to figure out what it was that she'd done wrong such that God had punished her by my having a stroke. As you might imagine, I contemplated a number of different competing responses to this, but what I finally said was (something along the lines of) "Look, I understand why you want to build a narrative out of this that involves some responsible agent making decisions that are influenced by your choices, and I recognize that we're all in a difficult emotional place right now and you do what you have to do, but let me offer you an alternative narrative: maybe I had a survivable stroke at 40 so I'd start controlling my blood pressure so I didn't have a fatal one at 45. Isn't that a better story to tell yourself?"

I was pretty proud of that interaction.