I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (10 page)

Back then, I think, a broader realization was beginning to sink in for Jim: I wasn’t “getting” any of this. For example, we would
take walks as a family around the neighborhood, to the post office, or to the park, and I continued to not have any idea where I was or where I was going. I wouldn’t remember walking along the exact same sidewalk, even if I had walked the route earlier in the week, or earlier that same day. I was lost in my own suburban neighborhood. But if Jim was even aware of this, he surely didn’t know what to do about it.

My lightning strikes continued, with a frequency of one every two or three days. Jim just thought they were caused by some sort of sensory overload that would overwhelm my nervous system, which in turn would trigger a shutdown. Almost as if I had blown a fuse, I would collapse and be unresponsive for several minutes.

I think Jim probably sensed that I needed help, but he was back at work trying to make up for all the time he had missed earlier that spring and summer. Plus, the neurologists kept telling him that there was nothing wrong with me. Jim’s parents offered to pay for a live-in nanny to help with the boys, which might relieve some of my stress. Jim asked around and soon hired a woman who was probably in her early to midthirties. And for a few weeks she did, indeed, keep the boys and me alive, keep the house from burning down, and most likely she prevented several major catastrophes. However, she was a devout Christian, and when she came upon Jim’s extensive stash of pornography, she told him she could no longer work in our home.

Suddenly Benjamin, Patrick, and I were on our own once again. I would wake up each morning with no memory of what had occurred the previous day. I recognized Jim and the boys simply because I saw them every day, but I would have no recollection of
what any of us had done the day before, or what the plan was for that new day. Each day the world beyond my front door was an absolute unknown. Jim says that our family was full of
Lord of the Flies
incidents, in that he never knew exactly what he would come home to after work each day. Would I be there with Benjamin and Patrick? Would we all be gone? Would the boys be playing together in the backyard all by themselves with me nowhere in sight? Would I be there, but have no idea where Benjamin or Patrick were? Would the bathtub be overflowing? Would the oven or stove be on? Would the car be running in the driveway? I am terrified when I think about what that must have been like for the boys and me. I honestly do not know how we all survived those first days, weeks, months, and even years.

Part of the key to our survival may have been that my life quickly became governed by a very specific routine and a precise daily schedule. Most people find a certain amount of comfort in their day-to-day habits, and I suppose we all have a particular order that we like to do things in in our daily lives, whether it is a certain morning routine, or when, where, and with whom we like to eat our meals during the day, or our daily work schedules at the office. On the other hand, most people don’t have a serious meltdown or mental collapse if they sleep through their alarm one morning, or if they have to push their lunchtime meeting to the following day. I would freak out about far less. If it was time for the boys and me to take our daily walk, and it was suddenly storming outside . . . I would be lost, and not know what I was supposed to do instead. If we lost power in the house during the time my schedule allotted for doing laundry, I would begin to sob. My daily routine was vital because it was all I knew. We had a gigantic wall
calendar filled with pictures and stickers. The calendar carefully scripted out activities for the kids and me, and I would consult it to find out what we were supposed to be doing from one hour to the next. If a new task was introduced and I carefully worked it into my routine, I could repeat it and remember it. But God forbid I should ever reach the end of my to-do list before the end of the day. Without my list, I would be totally discombobulated. I wouldn’t have any “next move.” The opposite was true as well. If Jim came home from work and I had not yet completed everything that was planned for that day, I would again become totally distraught. Jim understands now that back in the early years after the accident, the notion that I would actually have a say in what I could do simply didn’t occur to me, and even if it did, the idea may have terrified me.

My mom wanted desperately to help out somehow, as well as give Jim a break. But my younger brother, Mark, was still living at home and was not yet driving. Mom felt like she couldn’t very well desert him to come to Fort Worth to look after me. Instead it was decided that Jim would drive Benjamin, Patrick, and me to Houston to stay with my parents for a week. My parents now feel incredibly guilty about how little they understood of my new reality. My mom says that all she really knew was that I had this head injury and that I had trouble remembering things. The letters I sent her looked as if a first grader had written them, “all phonetic misspellings and shaky script on lined paper,” but still she and my dad were not overly concerned.

It is highly unlikely that I in fact recognized either of my parents when I climbed out of the car in their driveway. But because Jim had prepared me for this particular reunion, I was able to greet
them both with a sort of affection and warmth. Even so, my parents say that they noticed immediately how much I had changed. They had known me as the family troublemaker, loud, defiant, and stubborn. Now my personality was completely different. My dad was surprised at how cooperative and friendly I appeared, nothing like the person I had been even a few months earlier.

Mom thinks it likely that I woke up every morning that week in Houston unsure of where I was or why I was there. I must have been terribly confused to be yet again in a new, unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people. But Mom thinks I would eventually hear the recognizable sounds of Benjamin and Patrick, and then I would slowly find my bearings, and greet my parents as if nothing was amiss.

Not that everything went smoothly that week. Mom remembers taking me to a fancy luncheon and fashion show at a ritzy yacht club in the upscale Houston suburb of Clear Lake. There were white linen tablecloths on the tables, and waiters in tuxedos. The only person I vaguely knew at this affair was my mother, but she recalls that I “did a good job of making conversation and acting normal.” In the car afterward as we were driving home, Mom claims I looked at her and said, “That’s the dumbest thing I have ever done.” Mom thinks I had no clue as to what had just happened. Or why. Why on earth had we gone to this place and eaten this meal? After all, it is entirely possible that since leaving the hospital I had never eaten anywhere except at a table in a house.

My dad remembers something else peculiar about that visit. I wouldn’t even enter the backyard, because of the pool. I was absolutely petrified of that pool. He and my mom found that surprising, since I had always been a strong swimmer and loved the water.
I had even been a lifeguard as a teenager. Once again, they seemed not to understand the extent of my impairment. Nobody could comprehend that I was a different person, a new person, just observing and learning stuff as I went along. I seriously doubt I even understood my own fear of my parents’ pool.

Because I was so deathly afraid of the pool out back, and wouldn’t go near it, we usually spent the hottest part of the day with the boys in the second-floor family game room playing with toys that had belonged to us Miller kids years before. One afternoon I walked over to the piano and sat down. It was the same piano that I had learned to play on as a child. I placed my fingers on the keyboard and began playing Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” Mom says I played it nearly flawlessly from start to finish. From memory.

When I was through, I turned to Mom and asked, “What was that? Where did that come from?” Mom told me that “The Entertainer” was a song that I had learned for a recital as a child. I was not able to ever repeat that performance. It was just gone. A kind of doorway had been opened momentarily, and then just as quickly, it was ruthlessly closed.

My brain was not in the habit of bestowing such gifts. Instead it was more often inclined to take away. During that same visit to Houston, Mom remembers coming upon me lying on the floor in the family room behind the wet bar. She thought it was an odd place for me to take a nap, but when she saw my eyes were open, she became alarmed. My parents weren’t used to my lightning, but Benjamin, who was just two at the time, said something like, “Oh, it’s all right, Grandma. She’ll wake up in a few minutes.” It happened again later in the week. My dad arrived home from work one evening, walked into the kitchen, and found me curled up in the corner of the large walk-in pantry. He looked at Mom and said, “What’s going on?” Mom replied, “She did this earlier. Just leave her alone and in a little while she’ll get up and come out of it.”

All that week, I kept asking for Jim several times a day. But when he finally did arrive the following Saturday afternoon, my mom says I had no idea who he was; in fact, I was afraid of him. Jim says he saw in my eyes instantly that I had once again forgotten him. Of course he was upset by that realization, but what could he do? Apparently, I made my younger brother, Mark, come with us on a walk that evening, because I did not want to be alone with this tall, curly-headed stranger.

A few days after returning home to Fort Worth, Jim sat down with me and taught me how to shave my legs. In fact, he taught me (and retaught me again and again and again) most of what I know about personal grooming. Come to think of it, Jim taught me pretty much everything I know about almost everything. Several weeks (or maybe it was months) later, there was even an awkward conversation about sex. I didn’t exactly understand when he tried to explain what it meant to be a “mother” to Benjamin and Patrick. And being a “wife” to Jim was even more beyond my comprehension.

I suppose once upon a time, three years before, Jim and I had fallen in love. After the accident, I had no concept of “love.” I knew Jim was there, and I quickly became dependent on him, and later became dependent on the boys, but I didn’t really know him very well. I didn’t know the most basic things about him, like what he enjoyed doing in his spare time, what his favorite foods were,
what genre of books he liked to read, what music he liked to listen to, and hundreds of other little details. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think I even really cared so much about any of that stuff, either. I wasn’t aware that I was supposed to care. However, Jim somehow still loved me. He still knew me, or at least the “me” I had been, which still looked like me. He knew everything about me; what I liked to do, eat, read, listen to, as well as every other trivial detail. But was I still that same Su? Hell no! Not by a long shot!

Jim loves telling me the following story:

I knew something was terribly wrong between you and me, but I could never put my finger on it. And then one day it hit me. It was less than a year after the accident. We had just kissed, and I felt you pull away with a look in your eyes that I had seen before but had never comprehended. You no longer had a husband, a lover, or an equal partner in an adult relationship. You didn’t get what any of those things meant. Instead, I was someone you could lean on. I was someone who could explain and teach things to you. Our relationship was no longer marital—instead it was familial. And the look on your face after that kiss was a look of discomfort, awkwardness, and even a little disgust. I was no longer your husband. I was more like a big brother. And it felt wrong somehow for you to kiss your big brother
that way
.