The Woman Who Can't Forget (14 page)

He may have been affected by the stress of Nana's condition. Though she hadn't been a fan of his at all when my parents started dating, he knew how important she was to my mother, and through the years he'd become devoted to her and she to him. She came with us on all of our family vacations, and she was a vital part of our immediate family. I'm sure he was also feeling the pressure of knowing how upsetting to my mother Nana's condition would be. But later it became clear that the problem was more deeply rooted and that this was just the first clear sign that he wasn't happy at home.

He didn't move out right away, and as I think about it, I realize he may have been staying at home at least in part due to my grandmother's deteriorating condition. Her heart had been stabilized, but her health took a decided turn for the worse, and she declined steadily over the next six months. On Friday, April 27, 1990, she suffered a massive stroke and was in a coma until she died on Thursday, May 10. Five days later, my dad told my mom he didn't want to be married anymore. He still didn't move out, though; that wouldn't be for several more months, and my parents didn't tell my brother and me for some time.

We could see that my mother was feeling really low, which was unsettling to my brother and me because she had always been such a stoic, but we knew that she was devastated by her mother's death. They had been so close, and now she had to go through all of Nana's things, which must have been horribly painful for her. On top of that, my father telling her that he wanted to leave must have been an enormous blow.

On May 19, my mother told me that things were bad between her and my father. I was completely shocked and didn't in fact really believe her. I had noticed that he was tense, but I was sure that due to all of the stress of her grief over Nana's death, she was overdoing the extent of whatever was going on between them. Then things took another twist. After Memorial Day weekend, my mom felt ill and began to worry that she had symptoms of a brain tumor again. She called her doctor, but he couldn't see her for two weeks, and those two weeks were like reliving the drama of her illness and surgery two years before. This time, however, she insisted there was no way she was going to have the surgery. The operation would require the complete removal of her remaining ear canal, leaving her deaf, and she was determined that she was not going to live without being able to hear. Hit by the emotions of everything that had scared her the first time, along with my father saying he was going to leave, I think she felt she didn't have the strength to go through it all again.

Suddenly life had become overwhelming again. Nana had died. My mother might be dying, and on top of that she was saying that she and my dad were having troubles. This was when I decided that I had to get my personal time line completely down on paper and holed myself up in my room all day doing so. I'm sure that the trauma of all that was going on had a good deal to do with why I became so obsessed with getting that done.

It wasn't an elixir for my family's problems. Although I was hugely relieved when it turned out a while later that my mother's tumor had not come back, things between her and my father didn't improve, and in midsummer—Monday, July 23, to be exact—my father finally told my brother and me that he was going to leave. Though my mother had told me things were bad between them, I was stunned that he was actually leaving, and I was torn between panic and disbelief. On Saturday, August 4, 1990, my father finally did leave—a day I hate to remember. I still had not accepted that my parents were splitting up, and in the end, they didn't, but years would go by before they would be reconciled. In the meantime, he moved into an apartment in the Wilshire Corridor, a strip of Wilshire Boulevard between Westwood and Beverly Hills twenty minutes from our house.

As he explains it now, he had taken care of everybody in his family since he was fourteen years old, and then all of us, and it had just begun to be too much. His business was high pressure. He was the one everybody came to for help professionally and personally. He had been basically on his own since he was fourteen, and now he was almost fifty-four, and he felt he just couldn't do it anymore.

The strange thing was, though, that he still spent a good deal of time with us. For the first six months, our family life stayed remarkably the same. He'd come over every Sunday night, and we'd go out to a restaurant for dinner, and he was over for every holiday that fall. The situation was confusing, and it took years to work itself out.

Not long after my dad moved out, my brother decided to share a house with his girlfriend. I was home from college by this time and had been a production assistant on several TV shows. I was liking the work, and I probably would have started looking for my own place too around this time, except that I did not want to leave my mother alone. My parents' split sent me into a serious, long emotional decline, with memories of all of our family fights careening through my mind. I still also had a good deal of pent-up emotion about my mother's brush with death, and I was angry at my dad and angry at myself for causing so much turmoil in the house. When my job as production secretary on a game show pilot ended on Halloween 1990, I stopped working. By the time January 1991 rolled around, I hardly went out of the house at all.

My friends would come over and ask what the matter was with me, but I couldn't shake the cycle of remembering, and I didn't want to talk about it with them. I didn't feel mentally disconnected the way I had during my mother's illness, I think because I was in the warm blanket of the security of my home, but I fell into a deep and unrelenting depression.

For the next two and a half years, I stayed very close to home. I almost constantly remembered every event from my mother's illness to my parents' breakup, and the whirl of incessant memories increasingly exhausted me. I should have been working my way up the ladder in entertainment, going out to trendy restaurants and clubs and looking for the man I'd marry, starting the family I'd dreamed of since I was a little girl. Instead, I couldn't get out of bed. I was still much too tied to my past and failing to move on with my own life.

Everyone else in my family was coping with the changes in our lives much better than I was. I was amazed at how they were just adjusting and making new lives for themselves. My brother was upset that they'd split up, but he was coping well and throwing himself into the early days of what would become a highly successful career as a TV producer. I was hiding out in bed.

The only good thing about my parents' separation was that it was the reason that my family went into much-needed therapy. I got out of the house in these years almost exclusively for the purpose of going to those sessions. The family therapy itself was unproductive and unpleasant. I was fixated on going back to when my mother was sick because I still felt so much emotion from that, and the rest of my family, and the therapist too, wanted to focus on the current problems between my parents. I also couldn't help myself from correcting everyone else about their memory of events, which was diametrically counter to the whole point of everyone sharing their interpretations.

What was good about the family therapy for me, though, was that the therapist recommended that I go to therapy on my own and also recommended a therapist, who turned out to be perfect for me. I hadn't understood that I had been waiting for years to talk to somebody about the bizarre phenomenon of all of my memories swirling in my head, and at this point in particular, I felt a tremendous need to rehearse all of the events from the day my mother discovered she had a brain tumor up to my father telling Michael and me that he was leaving the house. The shock from the fear of my mother dying was still very much in my mind—the look on my mother's face walking up the driveway that day played itself over and over. That would set off a whole string of memories in a vicious cycle, and those were what I now needed to talk into submission.

Most people describe the process of therapy—if it is successful—as a journey they make with their therapist. I can't really describe it that way. My therapist hardly said a word to me; he might make one or two observations or give me a different take on something, but he rarely interrupted my steady stream of remembrance. At first I questioned him about why he wasn't saying more, but over time, I realized that just letting me talk things out was the best thing he could possibly have done for me. As I look back on the process, I think that so much of what I needed was to talk about all of those memories nonstop and without offending anyone.

In a way, those therapy sessions were comparable to my journaling. Once I'd verbalized the memories, somehow I owned them in a new way. But there was another great benefit from those sessions: along the way I realized that I had never really allowed people into my life, not fully; I had never shared with them in any truly revelatory way what was going on in my head. By never having been able to make them understand, I had been unable to make sense myself of how my memory was ruling my life, imprisoning me and holding me back so profoundly from the normal process of emerging into a life of my own.

It took seventeen months of talking to get it all out, and then, for whatever reason it was on that particular day, the morning of Tuesday, October 20, 1992, I woke up and my funk had lifted. There was nothing special about the day. It was an absolutely ordinary, perfectly pleasant October day in southern California. I just didn't feel bad anymore. I called a friend who was living in New York, and we talked for a while. When I got off the phone, I made breakfast and realized that I felt lighter of spirit than I ever had before. That morning was the beginning of the end of my therapy and the start of my return to life. The 1992 holiday season was wonderful.

My therapist had told me back in late August that he was leaving Los Angeles in January to take a job in North Carolina. I was stunned and worried about finding someone new, but I still had five months. As the date got nearer, he told me that he could give me a referral to a new therapist, but he thought I had come a long way and that if I didn't want to continue, that was okay. I have heard that in therapy, it is the last few minutes of a session that are the most important, because that's when you know that you'd better get out what you came to say or you'll have to wait a week to say it. My last therapy session was the day after President Clinton's first inauguration, on Thursday, January 21, 1993, and in those last minutes, I was sure I was done; I had nothing left to say for a next session. I felt that I was making a fresh start, as was the country.

A few months earlier, the sister of a friend of mine had given birth, and I started to take care of her baby almost daily. She was adorable, and I absolutely loved taking care of her. Spending time with her, taking part in the excitement and joy of a new life embracing the world, was rejuvenating. Although I continued to shy away from romantic relationships, my friends had stayed loyal to me, and I resumed my social life. The release from emotional strain that I learned in those therapy sessions proved a lasting ballast for me.

In the end, many years later, my parents got back together, eight years after my dad had walked out of the house. In March 1998, I went out of town for a friend's wedding, and when I came home, my mom right away told me that my dad wanted me to call him. When I did, he said to me simply, “I'm coming home.” All he would say at the time was that he realized that he made a big mistake. I was surprised that after all that time, my mother took him back, but when I asked her how she felt about it, she reminded me that he had never asked for a divorce, and he hadn't kicked her out of the house, or ever refused to pay for anything. In many ways, he had continued to be with us and had shouldered his family responsibilities. I found myself listening to her quiet wisdom with new respect, and I envied her ability to move on from the past.

As much pain as my dad's leaving caused, I realize now that we all needed to grow, and ultimately their breakup helped us do that. In those eight years, we all made progress. I am extremely proud when I consider how much my family has been through, and yet we all made it back together. I might have been unhappy with my personal life because I was now over thirty and unmarried and still did not have the family of my own that I had always wanted, but we loved each other and had a better understanding of each other. Best of all, my parents seemed to have revived the magic in their relationship, and I was both happy and surprised they could have gone through so much and could still share that. What I didn't know yet was that I was about to experience some magic in my own life, which would finally help me to come to better terms with the force of my memory in my life.

T
he first touch of magic in my life was the response that I received on June 8, 2000, from Dr. James McGaugh, only ninety minutes after having finally sent him off my e-mail asking for help. I had realized at last that I really needed to figure out what was going on with my memory. The therapist I'd gone to had done me a world of good, but he had no explanation to offer about the swirling of my memories; I imagine he believed, as my mother had always said, that I just dwelled on my past far too much. But I was sure that I wasn't consciously calling up my memories; they were just too random, too spontaneous, and too insistent. There was something different, and something very strange, going on in my head, and I was ready to come to new terms with the phenomenon in my mind. My memory had been ruling my life, and if there were a way for me to find some solace from the constant assault, I was ready for that.

I come from a long line of strong women, and I wanted to be more like them—to cast away my fears of change, of death, of the future and live with the survival spirit that had allowed them to overcome so many sorrows they'd faced in life. One of my favorite memories is of the time when I realized in a profound way just what a powerful, undaunted group of women I was privileged to be part of. On New Year's Day 1989, my family gathered at my Aunt Ruth's house, the last time we were all to be together. My Grandma Helen, Nana, was there; she had taken care of Michael and me much of the time when we were young. My father's mother, Grandma Rose, and her second husband, whom we called Poppy Al, were there, along with my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Jack, my Great-Aunts Molly, Ann, and Minnie (who was ninety at the time and who lived to be 103), and Minnie's daughter, Florence, and her husband, Sandy. Over the next few years, the older generation began to fail and started to pass away. That day, we all sat around the living room sharing stories, catching up on our lives. Then we moved into the dining room for a big meal and spent more wonderful hours eating and talking, and during the course of that day, I realized in a new way just how much the women of my family meant to me, how much I admired their strength and life wisdom.

These were women who were well into their eighties or nineties; they had buried children and husbands, and had faced God knows how many other challenges in their long lives, and there they were—still keeping their heads up, still laughing, still finding pleasure in life. They imparted a new awareness in me that day about the value of moving on in life, of pushing forward rather than always looking back. I had never been able to do so, but at this point I was finally ready to start down a path of discovery that I hoped might possibly free me from my ever-present past. Having taken the first decisive step, with enormous trepidation, and then to have received Dr McGaugh's answer so quickly was simply thrilling.

I knew nothing about the science of memory and had no idea what to expect from my meeting with him. He and I had talked on the phone briefly on June 12 to pick a date to meet, but he hadn't filled me in about what to expect when I got there. I was so excited about the meeting that I got up really early that morning—Saturday, June 24—and as I drove down to Irvine that day, my mind was racing. I wanted to be sure to describe fully what my experience with my memory had been like, to be sure that he understood what a dominant and strange role it had played in my life. I had decided that I would bring him some of my journals. They always provoked a stunned reaction when I showed them to my friends, and I figured that they would be important for him to know about. I had a terrible time deciding that morning which ones to pack; if left to my own devices, I would have hauled my whole trunk full of them down. But my dad told me not to overwhelm him and just to bring journals for a couple of years. In the end, I brought six years' worth.

When I drove up to the research center, the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory on the UCI campus, I started to feel nervous. The center was housed in an imposing concrete building among a complex of buildings, and I felt completely out of my element. I never had a flair for science in school and had never spent any time with scientists, and the building alone was intimidating.

Dr. McGaugh's office was just what I had envisioned, with an impressive wall of framed diplomas and awards and lined with books. There were books everywhere around the room, with sheets of paper sticking out of them, and whole bookshelves loaded with bound volumes of scientific papers.

After he gave me the tests of dates and events from
The 20th Century Day by Day
, I showed him my journals, and he was clearly intrigued. As he flipped through them, I was anxious. No one had ever read my journals; some of my friends had seen me writing in them, but I'd never allowed anyone to start reading them. I was determined, though, that with Dr. McGaugh, I was going to open up and tell him whatever he needed to know about my memory and my life in order to figure out what was happening in my head. At that point, I was still hoping that he would recognize right away what the reason was that my memory works the way it does.

After we talked for a little while about my life and my experience with my memory, he asked me to lunch, and I told him how the move to California had been so upsetting and after that how I couldn't get thoughts of New Jersey and New York out of my head. At the end of lunch, as we were saying good-bye, he told me that he was going home to “get his little gray cells” to grasp what had just happened. He told me he'd never talked to anyone before who described having a memory like mine and had also never read about a memory like mine in the scientific literature.

The next day, I received an e-mail from him thanking me for coming down and asking if I would come again in July. We set a date of July 8, and that day I met the two other scientists who would participate in the study of me. Dr. McGaugh had contacted them because they had areas of expertise in the study of memory that were complementary to his. He told me that he would like me to undergo a series of tests and explained they would be the beginning of what would likely expand into a longer-term study.

One of the scientists Dr. McGaugh chose to team up with was Dr. Larry Cahill, a neurobiologist, and the other was Dr. Elizabeth Parker, a neuropsychologist. I was quickly to learn that the study of memory is a vast area of science, spreading over many specialty fields, and that even many of the most basic questions, such as just how a memory is formed, how and where our memories are housed in our brains, and how the process of remembering works physically, have yet to be conclusively answered.

Dr. Cahill's area of expertise, neurobiology, is the study of how our neurons form circuits in our brains and how those circuits help us to process information: to perceive, think, feel, and, key to working with me, form and recall memories. Dr. Cahill's special interest has been in how our brains store information, and especially how they sort out which information is important to store and to be able to retrieve, and which is better discarded, or at least stored in a way that mitigates against retrieval. The notion is that all of our brains are crammed full of information but that most people have neural circuits that allow the retrieval of only a selective sliver. One of the big open questions in the science of memory concerns whether our brains may in fact store a record of everything that has happened to us—of every day of our life—but that our memory retrieval circuits tap into only a tiny portion of that vast storehouse.

On his faculty profile Web page, Dr. Cahill features a fascinating quote from one of the founders of psychology, William James, that resonates powerfully for me: “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in the case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” Dr. Cahill found my memory interesting in part because he has worked on the question of whether it's because memories are particularly emotional that we remember them, and my memory doesn't seem to select for them in that way.

In investigating the processes of memory formation and retrieval, Dr. Cahill has incorporated the rapidly developing techniques of brain mapping into his work, through imaging of the brain with PET scans and fMRIs, which take pictures of the brain during the process of thinking. Eventually that avenue of research into how my memory works was to lead to some astonishing results. It's only recently that I've learned what those scans revealed.

Dr. Parker's area of expertise, neuropsychology, focuses largely on the study of symptoms that are associated with brain disorders or injuries. She has studied athletes who suffered brain injuries, for example, as well as people with amnesia and other cognitive disorders. The work she would do with me would be to administer a series of diagnostic tests to evaluate my memory functioning and my general cognitive abilities.

A great deal has been discovered about the functions of different regions of the brain from the study of people with cognitive impairments and about the interconnections among the brain's regions. One of the most famous of such patients is the man known in the scientific literature as H.M., who has played an important role in the development of neuropsychology. He was epileptic, and in 1953, he elected to have radical brain surgery in an attempt to cure terrible seizures he was experiencing. The surgery divided a section in the middle of the brain that plays a vital role in memory, especially the recall for facts and events, which is called the medial temporal lobe. He has been studied ever since the operation due to its tragic side effect: he developed a severe form of amnesia. Although his memory of his life before the surgery was not impaired, except for the time just preceding the surgery and some of his memories for a decade or so before, he was unable to form certain kinds of new memories.

He is unable to create long-term memories for events, so does not have autobiographical memory for the long stretch of his life that has followed the surgery. This impairment has not stopped him from being able to learn new information, such as a range of tasks that scientists have taught him to test this ability. The complexity of the types of memories he has been able to learn, and of the ways in which his memory is impaired, have provided a treasure trove for study, making enormous contributions to the understanding of how the anatomy of the brain relates to memory functioning.

The field of neuropsychology has evolved rapidly in recent years, and it can provide invaluable clinical assistance for people who suffer brain damage or have a disorder. One of the things I'd like this book to do is to bring the field more into the public's awareness because, as Dr. Parker explained to me, many people never get neuropsychological treatment because they don't even know that they might be able to get help. I know what a comfort it was to me to have verification of the nature of my memory and all its quirky functions, and I can only imagine the difference it would make for so many others who don't even know what they're suffering from.

One of the stories Dr. Parker told me, of a patient who was referred to her, has especially stuck with me. The woman could barely talk; she had aphasia, a condition whereby people's speech is badly impaired because their brains are unable to put words together appropriately. She might say a sentence such as, “I'm going to drink the straw now because I'm tired of the clock.” Dr. Parker believed she had damage to an area of a particular part of the brain, which such speech problems are symptomatic of, and it was so sad to me that this woman had been suffering for so long without any idea what was wrong with her.

One of the great challenges in the study of the brain is that it's difficult to see inside it. We can see a broken bone, or a tumor, or that a wound is getting infected. But tucked away inside our skulls, the brain and its circuits are illusive. Even with brain scanning developing rapidly, so that ever more refined pictures of the brain are possible, those pictures are taken as if from 2,000 feet from the surface of earth. The specific neuronal circuits are so delicate and intricately woven that they don't show up on the scans.

Neuropsychological testing is a vital way to get a more detailed mapping of what areas are damaged and to point to possible therapy or treatment. One of the most profound realizations I've come to through my work with the scientists is that even with all of the amazing developments in brain science over the past couple of decades, the understanding of the brain is still in its infancy. The study of superior memory is an area that's particularly undeveloped.

As Dr. McGaugh explained to me later, the battery of tests to evaluate memory functioning have been designed with the purpose of measuring degrees of impairment, not to measure how much above the norm a person's memory abilities might be. As it would turn out, I would get perfect scores on a number of the tests I took, but those scores weren't able to tell them just how much higher I might have scored if the tests were designed to measure abilities well above the average. The team would therefore not only administer a selection of the standard memory and general cognition tests, but would tailor some additional tests specifically to measure my abilities, for example, tests of my ability to recall the days of the week for dates they randomly selected, as well as of my ability to recall current facts about events, and my recall of autobiographical events. They would also interview me to get a life history.

I had several sessions with Dr. Parker, starting on July 15, in which she conducted the life history interview. It was like another round of talk therapy. Then she administered a battery of standardized neurological tests. These are used to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in people's brain functioning, including a group of memory tests known as the Wechsler Memory Scale–Revised (WMS–R), an updated version of a set of tests for memory devised in 1945 by pioneering American psychologist David Wechsler. The WMS–R measures memory abilities in areas such as auditory recall, visual memory, immediate recall, and working memory, as well as what is referred to as general memory. My test results were to reveal an atypical pattern: Generally people score at about the same level on most of the tests. But my results showed that my memory was extremely strong—very far above the norm—in some areas and yet relatively weak in other areas, which, as Dr. Parker was to explain to me later, was verification of what I had told them about how much difficulty I had with memorizing generally and especially when I was in school.