How do you know who you are? You remember your name, where you live, what you do, what you did yesterday. Your memories are, in essence, your identity. What if you forget? I’ve always been a compulsive keeper of lists, a taker of pictures, a journaler—people counted on me to remember things. And then one night, my husband fell and hit his head. He woke up with no short-term memory. It felt like a cosmic prank.
“I don’t remember who I used to be,” he told me, a few weeks out of the hospital. I promised that he was the same happy man we’d always known. A little white lie. Clearly, something in his brain had been rewired, on a fundamental level. He lost his balance, and his sense of humor. His ability to recognize sarcasm—my native language—was severely impaired. I worried about his future, our future, while he lived only in the present. The story of his helicopter ride to the ER thrilled him. We must have told it twenty times, each one new for him.
In a lifetime of planning for disasters, I’d never counted on a trip to the Neuro ICU. Cancer, diabetes, a kidney transplant, sure. Heart attack, gun attack, bear attack, check. We even had insurance for identity theft. Not identity loss. Sharks were a bigger threat, and we lived fifty miles from the sea.
When the worst happens, the world shrinks down to a very fine point. The future disappears. There’s only this moment, and the next, if you’re lucky. All you can do is breathe. It took nearly losing the love of my life to understand that all my fear and worry amounted to nothing. I wasted so much time.
What a cliché, to be thankful for tragedy, but that’s how it works. These days, we try to focus on the simple things: love, laughter, the quiet miracle of being alive. Looking back to that night, that call, I can only be grateful. So profoundly, humbly grateful. The trick is not forgetting.
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