I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia (15 page)

Patrick went through a phase where he would wait for me to say those precise words in a certain tone of voice that meant I was really serious. Both boys talk about how they would wait for
those
words and
that
tone before actually doing anything that I told them to do.

Each child, each day, was a new and exciting challenge.

I had a Burley trailer attached to my bike back then. In the summertime, the boys would crawl into that trailer with their big beach towels, pool toys, and snacks, and we would set out for the neighborhood pool. I was deathly afraid of the water myself, so I signed them up for a few sessions of swimming lessons in the mornings. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to teach them how to swim. We would often go back in the afternoons so they could practice and show me what they learned, as well as play with other neighborhood kids.

On one such bike ride to the pool, Benjamin and Patrick
suddenly felt the trailer hit the curb and then lurch onto its side and skid to a halt. Benjamin, taking command as he usually did, unzipped the mesh covering and poked his head out. He saw me collapsed on the pavement. “You didn’t seem to be hurt, but you were unresponsive. You weren’t doing anything, just lying there. I’m pretty sure what happened was that you had one of your ‘lightning’ episodes. You must have hit the curb and then fallen over. I told Patrick to stay with you and I ran up the driveway to the house we were in front of and asked the lady if I could call 911. Then I went back to sit with Patrick on the curb and wait for the ambulance to come.” The paramedics arrived a few minutes later and saw that I had just a few scrapes and bruises. Nothing looked too serious. But when they asked me where I lived, I didn’t know. They were alarmed that I appeared so confused, and they held me in the ambulance until I came out of the “lightning” situation and became more coherent. (Remember my old pals “lightning,” “piercing headache,” and “foggy confusion.”)

It was this episode that forced Jim to consider that perhaps not everything was as well with me as he thought. He knew that I might not always be able to find my way home (Hmm . . . because
that’s
certainly normal . . . ), but he thought that I would always somehow be able to keep the kids safe. This little bike accident forced Jim to rethink. What if I had been in the car? He had no idea that this sort of thing had already occurred while I was driving. He ordered me a medical alert bracelet, which would instruct medical personnel to look in my purse for a card. The card explained that I had suffered a closed-head injury, that I had memory issues, and that Jim should be telephoned at work if I became incapacitated. A medical alert bracelet seems like a woefully inadequate solution to conceivably hazardous circumstances.
But in his own head, Jim thought that doing
something
concrete, like ordering me a medical alert bracelet,
was
a proper response to his many safety concerns. What else was he to do? He had to be at work, and it wasn’t like there was any extra money to hire help for me at home.

Despite my obvious problems, I continued to feign comprehension of the world even among close friends and family. Road trips would invariably trigger “lightning” and confusion. In the summer of 1990, the family drove to Hilton Head, South Carolina, for a weeklong Miller family reunion. I went through the motions well enough so that my brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents had no idea how little I understood of what was going on. My outward appearance held up well until dinner one night with the entire family in a noisy restaurant. Jim immediately recognized my panicked look and announced that we needed to leave. As we got up, everyone else got up as well. And as I was walking out of the restaurant with Jim and the boys, the rest of the family was right behind us. Jim remembers me looking back and saying, “Who are these people, and why are they following us?”

A photograph taken that week shows the Meck family among the palm trees. Benjamin is staring off in one direction, Patrick in the other. Jim is smiling at the camera, and I am gazing off into nothingness, my eyes unfocused and blank. My sister Barb observed that in that picture, “You looked so lost. You were able to put on a good front, and follow along, and participate in the family activities. But I never understood that you didn’t really have a clue of what to do, or what was going on.”

With every passing day, there were new struggles, and Jim’s temper got shorter and shorter. On the drive back to Baltimore from Hilton Head, our bikes fell off the car and onto the highway. The straps holding them onto the bike rack had evidently worn down and weakened. They suddenly tore and our bikes went flying off the back of the car and bounced onto the middle of I-95. Jim let out a stream of obscenities and drove recklessly off the highway at the next exit, and then backtracked up the access road. When he got out of the car, he told the three of us to “sit there, and shut up!” He then hopped the fence and walked out onto I-95. He held up his hands to stop the traffic, picked up both bikes, carried them to the side of the road, and threw them over the fence. Our bikes were terribly bent and broken, but somehow Jim managed to attach them back onto the bike rack. For a long time afterward, he was really, really angry, so the boys and I just stayed quiet while he drove. I get a sick feeling in my stomach—it actually clenches—even now when I think back to that incident and Jim’s fury.

The very next summer, I went with the boys to Florida to visit my sister Barb and her husband, Scott, in Gainesville. I don’t know why Jim didn’t join us. He may have come along as far as his parents’ house in Georgia, and then ended up wanting to spend time with them. During our stay, Barb, Scott, Benjamin, Patrick, and I all drove to Orlando to visit Disney World. It was probably a long, busy, hot, overstimulating day, and that night—ironically enough, during the Main Street Electrical Parade—the “lightning” went off in my head. Barb remembers me grabbing my head and saying, “I don’t feel good.” And then I checked out. She says I was just gone. I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t walk. I was crying because my head hurt terribly. Barb continues, “And we were packed in with thousands of other people watching the parade.” Somehow, she found me a wheelchair and she and I headed for the car. But she soon discovered that she couldn’t take a wheelchair on the monorail—the quieter of the two options—to the parking
lot. Instead, we had to go on the large ferryboat, which, Barb recalls, entertained passengers with loud music. She says I could barely talk and I was holding my head in my hands, and people kept coming up and asking if I needed any help. At the hotel the next morning, I was still a mess. Barb can remember checkout time coming and going. She describes me as being “really groggy and slow, almost in slow motion.” (There they are again—my trinity—“lightning,” “piercing headache,” and “foggy confusion.”)

Perhaps as a result of that lightning episode, I have no memories of this vacation. In fact, when I was talking to Benjamin recently and he mentioned this trip, I was convinced that he was mistaken. I told him the only time I thought he had ever gone to Disney World was when he went with his high school choir.

I have one final, albeit vague, recollection from our time in Baltimore. I can picture myself sitting on our yellowish easy chair next to the fireplace, crying. Then I can remember Jim forcefully loading me into the car, driving me somewhere, and leaving me there. The one clear memory I have regarding this episode is thinking, I can’t lose it anymore because Jim gets so pissed off when I do. I am going to have to try harder and do better. Did I take yet another trip to a psych ward? Am I confusing this time with the other time Jim took me to the psychiatric hospital right after we moved to Baltimore when we were staying at the Welcome Inn? I don’t know, and Jim doesn’t remember, either. But as he comments, “Just because I don’t remember, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

—The Cranberries

F
or many years, I was beyond clueless about the whole “marriage and family” concept. I never knew exactly how I was supposed to act around people in the first place,
and
I wasn’t sure where I fit into all the words that I heard being thrown around: mom, dad, husband, wife, spouse, son, daughter, brother, sister, son-in-law, daughter-in-law (for some reason I always thought of “in-law” as being like “in jail”), cousin, sibling; dating, engaged, married, pregnant; infant, toddler, teenager, grandma, grandpa, aunt, uncle, related by blood (. . . Ewwww! . . . Blood? . . . Really?!). The list seemed endless.

There were way too many words in the English language to describe relationships among families. I was “Su Meck,” but
Benjamin and Patrick called me “Mom” or “Mommy.” I also called the woman who lived in Houston “Mom,” but when I sent letters to her I wrote “Mom Miller” on the outside of the envelope, not “Mom Meck.” The little boys lived with me, but I didn’t live with the woman in Houston, and they called her “Grandma.” Benjamin and Patrick were called “brothers,” but I had “brothers,” too, and Rob and Mark were nothing like Benjamin and Patrick. And my brothers did not live together or with me. I had “sisters,” and I was sometimes called a “sister,” but Barb and Diane had different last names from me, too. If we were related, why did we all have different names? And where were Benjamin and Patrick’s sisters? Jim didn’t call me “Mom,” or “sister,” and most of the time he didn’t call me “Su.” Instead he called me “Subie,” or his “wife,” and showed me pictures of our “wedding.” But where were Benjamin and Patrick in those pictures? And who were all those others in the photos? (Thankfully, only about twenty people attended my wedding.) A big part of the problem was that I continued (for years) to have an incredibly literal mind. To a certain extent, I still do.

So I just did what I always did. I sat back, listened, observed, and tried to make sense out of what people around me said and did. And then I attempted to act like everyone else and to fit in as best I could, or at least not stick out. If I was mostly quiet, and appeared happy and agreeable, then life was good. I learned to go along to get along, and nobody questioned my behavior. In fact, quite the opposite. Everyone who knew me from before, my family especially, kept telling me how much “nicer,” “quieter,” “more content,” “more pleasant,” “calmer,” and “more good-natured” I was now. My dad loved to say, jokingly (I think), “We should’ve hit her over the head with a two-by-four a long time ago!” All of
those positive reactions were a good thing, right? I can remember that when I was around, friends and family seemed to smile and laugh a lot. Not that I understood why they did. Or why “quiet and content” was such a good thing. But smiles and laughter are good, right?

But then I would often get even more confused because, depending on those in attendance, “nice, pleasant, and calm” did not always equal “right” or “correct.” There seemed at times to be different rules with Jim at home as opposed to at church, for instance. I tended to agree with nearly all of Jim’s opinions, ideas, and decisions, mostly because I didn’t understand what he was talking about the majority of the time and agreeing with him just made life easier. I would literally nod and smile, just like some sort of creepy Stepford wife. And more often than not, he was pleased. But occasionally, he would become infuriated with me for
not
arguing with him! Why? Why on earth would someone
want
to yell and argue? He would call me “a doormat,” “a scared rabbit,” “stupid,” and “totally ignorant.” And I suppose it was true. (I still am about a lot of things.) But that was because I didn’t understand why he wanted me to disagree with him. Wasn’t he the one who was supposed to know what was best? He would shout that he wanted me to “offer a fucking opinion for once in your life!” But I couldn’t because I honestly didn’t have an opinion. About much of anything.