The Woman Who Can't Forget (16 page)

The next step was for us to meet, and I was scared. He had e-mailed me a picture of himself, but there was no way I was going to send him one of me. What if he hated the way I looked? We might not have met for months because Jim lived up in Napa Valley, north of San Francisco, but it so happened that in mid-November, he was coming down to LA for a friend's wedding. He asked me if I wanted to get together after that, and I agreed. We made plans to meet on Tuesday, November 19, 2002, the most momentous day of my life.

I had reserved a hotel room because I wanted us to have privacy. I had told my mother I was meeting Jim and would be away for the night, and although she was worried because we had met on the Internet, I was thirty-six after all, and I didn't need to ask for her permission. The only thing I wasn't ready for when the day finally came was that Jim showed up early. He called me at the office around 2:00 in the afternoon, and I sent him over to the Century City Mall because I couldn't leave work until 7:00.

We arranged to meet in a park in Beverly Hills, and when I pulled up I saw him sitting in his car right away. Seeing him there was one of the scariest moments of my life, but I made myself pull into the spot right next to him. We got out of our cars at exactly the same time, and he just pulled me into his arms and started kissing me. There was an instant physical attraction between us. After all the days of anticipation, we were finally standing there for real, and there was no awkwardness and no distance. I had never felt that way before, and my defenses weren't just down—they were nonexistent. He said my heart was beating so fast that he could feel it. In his wonderful supportive, caring way, he right away told me he thought I was beautiful and sexy, and I cannot tell you how much those words meant to me. In our time together, he told me that every day.

Jim was a big man, roughly 6 foot 1 inch, and a very well-built 200 pounds with broad shoulders that looked as if he could lift a car. His hair was salt-and-pepper, and he had a thick mustache and hazel eyes. He wore glasses because he had type 1 diabetes, and it had affected his vision. The first thing I made special note of about him that day we met were his hands. I loved those hands. They were strong, with long fingers, and when he talked, he talked with them gracefully. They were exactly what I always thought a man's hands should look like.

I had always thought that my husband would be like my dad, and Jim was completely different. He had five tattoos—on one arm a cougar and on the other a lunar eclipse. Running down one leg, the whole length of his thigh, was a castle, and if you really sat and looked at it, you could see people in the windows. On the other leg was a huge wizard. He also had three earrings—a diamond and two gold hoops.

I let Jim see everything about me, and I don't just mean physically. I mean all the things that we hide from the rest of the world behind our public faces. He was the only person except for my brother and my parents who has ever really fully seen my private face. Even my friends saw only bits and pieces of me. They knew about my memory, but they knew almost nothing about how it had tormented me in my life. Jim saw inside me and saw the years of scars and the pain my memory had caused, and he accepted everything about me. That was an enormous gift.

When we made love for the first time, the second night after we'd met, I felt healthy and utterly uninhibited. I had never known the beauty of a great sexual appetite, or that great love and great sensuality went so well together, and I marveled that I could feel so close to him so quickly. I had never felt anything like that connection with any of the other men I'd dated. At thirty-six, I finally really became a woman.

I think my parents were taken aback about how quickly we'd gotten together. We went to my house for dinner on that first trip of his, and my mom took some pictures of us. I think she may have wanted a photo of Jim in case I disappeared and they had to call the police. Jim would later tell me, “You know every time I touched your hand or moved closer to you, I'd look up at your mom and she was glaring at me.” I said, “She was memorizing your face in case you murdered me so she could give a good sketch to the cops.”

That first night at the hotel as I lay in his arms, he suddenly looked at me and said, “What are you doing for the next forty years?” And I answered, “I don't know. What are we doing?” He just smiled, and I felt that the entire universe had moved into a new position.

On Friday, December 6, I flew up to Napa to meet Jim's sons and see his world, and though I was nervous about the trip, that weekend was one of the best of my life. The night I got there, I realized that Jim made me feel completely safe. Ever since I was a baby, I had needed some kind of noise to help me get to sleep, whether it was from the Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Room across the street in New York, or the first of many radios in New Jersey starting at the age of six, or the television that was put in my room in March 1983. Even so, I had suffered for fifteen years with insomnia, and for the four years before I met Jim, I had finally been sleeping but with the help of the television. When I got to his apartment I was surprised—and a little worried—to find out he didn't have a television set in his bedroom, and I figured I'd be up all night. But as soon my head hit the pillow I was fast asleep. In Jim's arms I felt safe and secure.

Although I had been speaking to the boys on the phone for a few weeks, I was nervous about meeting them. When I got off the plane, I was so nervous that I stopped in the bathroom to freshen up and collect my thoughts. This was a meeting that could change my life forever. In the arrivals area, Jim was waiting with Ben, the thirteen-year-old, and to my enormous relief, Ben had an excited glow on his face. Both of the boys welcomed me into their lives warmly, and I told myself it was a good thing they were boys. Remembering as vividly as I did what it was like being a teenage girl, I knew that if my father had brought a girlfriend home to meet me at that age, I would have given her the third degree.

Jim's kids meant the world to him, and I was, and am, undyingly grateful that they welcomed me into their lives so freely. I think they understood that their father's relationship with me was making him happy again after the stress and pain of his divorce and was reducing some of the tension between him and their mother. Early in our relationship, Jim told me how he had gone over to the house to help Ben wash the car for ex-wife Denise and that everyone got along and had a good time, but most of all how happy it had made the boys that their parents were getting along.

I went back up to Jim's at the end of December to spend my thirty-seventh birthday and the New Year with him. We were already talking about getting married, though we didn't make specific plans right away. Jim was the relationship that some people wait a whole lifetime for and never get. How can anyone describe the gift of love at first connection? I was even comfortable filling him in about the work the scientists were doing with me.

In November, I had received a letter from Dr. Parker letting me know that they were in the final stages of writing up their preliminary results and getting approval for the next step in their study of me. Jim was intrigued and supportive and not the least put off. To reach such a place of tranquillity and security and romance and magic at that point in my life was almost unfathomable. Suddenly I had the chance to become a wife and to start a family as I had always dreamed of doing. Though I wouldn't know Jim for long, he gave me a new strength and perspective on life that has profoundly transformed me.

If not for Jim, I don't know how I would have gotten through the move from our house in Encino, which we had lived in for twenty-eight years. My father was retiring, and my parents wanted to move to a smaller place. That fall, they filled me in that they were going to be looking for a new house. In the past, the prospect of moving had thrown me into paroxysms of anxiety; I had begged and pleaded with them not to do it and forced them to stay in LA, becoming a wreck. Moving out of the house wasn't as bad as moving across the country, but the idea was still terribly upsetting to me, and Jim helped me accept the news without falling into one of my panics. I realized that for the first time in my life, I was ready to live with the memories of my past and, if not exactly leave them behind, accept that I could take them with me and move on.

In December 2002 Jim and I had a conversation that changed the course of everything. He was unhappy with his job and frustrated that we weren't together all the time, and one night when he was sharing those thoughts with me, I suddenly asked him, “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” To my surprise, he shot right back with “Tennessee.” It turned out that his company was opening up a plant there, and he thought moving there might be an opportunity for a fresh start. To my even greater surprise, I found myself responding, “Let's go.” He said, “Okay,” and that was that. I had a good deal of trepidation about the idea, but I also sensed that it was vital that I make the commitment. I felt that Jim had come along to save my life, and I was going to let him save it, no matter how anxiety provoking that might be along the way. Knowing that he and I were going to be starting off on a life adventure was, for a start, a great help to me in coping with packing all of my huge collection of mementos up and coming to terms with moving out.

I had always known there would be a day that my parents would sell our house and I would have to pack everything up, but as the years went on and we kept living there, I continued to keep things. Not only had I filled my own bedroom up with my stuff, I had taken over my brother's room in October 1991, and it was crammed full. I still had my things from New Jersey and New York on top of twenty-eight years of California accumulations. I had a lifetime of stuff to go through.

On Saturday, January 11, 2003, I started to pack. It took five weeks to organize, pack, and load a portable storage container that we ordered, which was the size of a small garage. If you've ever gone through a cache of keep-sakes, cleaning out a desk drawer or an overstuffed closet, you've probably been plunged into your past—finding photos you'd lost track of, maybe college mementos or toys of your children that you had stowed away. Memories rush through your head, taking you back to people you hadn't thought about in years, or trips you'd taken, special times with long-lost friends, or time spent with loved ones who've passed on. Hours can go by, and it's like reliving your life. It can be emotionally exhausting. Packing up all of my artifacts was one of the most grueling and emotionally depleting experiences of my life, and I don't know if I could have done it if not for Jim having come into my life. For the first time, I was beginning to focus on the future instead of the past.

On Friday, January 17, Jim came down to Los Angeles for a four-day weekend. He and I had started to talk seriously by then about getting married and moving to Tennessee, and it was time for him to meet my extended family. It was my mother's birthday, and she used that as an excuse for everyone to come over and meet him. It had been two weeks since I had last seen him, and I was so happy when he walked into my office. When everyone heard he was there, they all came in, one by one, and before I could say anything, he was engaged in three different conversations. I spent the weekend introducing him to family and friends, and everyone loved him. We also mentioned our plans about moving to Tennessee to my parents, which they were much less pleased about. They were worried that we were being impetuous, and truth be told, so was I, but my worries about that weren't going to stop me.

For the next month, I was in the throes of packing. Into the storage unit went all of my stuffed animals; my Madame Alexander dolls and my Barbies; my library of over 250 books; my video library of almost a thousand tapes; my Internet research library, my record albums and 45s, and all the homemade tapes I had made for more than twenty years. The more I packed up and the closer the move came, the more my mind was assaulted with an overflow of memories and the more dread I began to feel. Thank God for Jim.

On Monday, February 17,2003, I cried as the storage container was being forklifted onto the truck that would take it away. The driver asked, “Why the tears?” and I told him that I had never been separated from my stuff before. He had no idea just what a crazy, obsessive, meticulously organized, and memory-drenched payload he was hauling away. I took a picture of the unit before I locked it up, filled to the rim, and as I watched the truck drive off, I realized that for the first time, I had the strength to grapple with my memory's inability to accept change or leave anything behind. I felt ready to live with the unrelenting memories of my past while at the same time moving on. It was because I had Jim next to me that I was able to stand there and watch that truck drive away and didn't feel that my life was being ripped away from me. He had begun to change me in a deep and abiding way.

I had no idea what a short time, in the end, I would have with him, and I will always be grateful for the long days we spent together in the next months as we began to plan our new life.

I
've heard that one of the terrors that people feel when they lose a loved one is that they will forget the sound of that person's voice; that more and more memories of times together will fade away through the years and that the sparkle of her eyes or the touch of his hand will recede into the vague mists of hazy recollection. This is one way in which my memory has proven to be a comfort; I have never had to feel that fear about losing my memories of Jim. Our time together was much too short, but I know that I will not forget a moment of it.

Our house went up for sale on Tuesday, February 18, 2003, and that same day I sent out invitations for a party at the house on Saturday, March 1, 2003. I had told my mother that I wanted to have one last big get-together in the house before we moved, and she said that would be great. What she didn't know was that Jim and I were planning that this would be our wedding day.

When we had told my parents about our intentions to marry and move, they had suggested we wait, and I would have preferred to plan more myself. Acting on such impulse was totally out of character for me, as much as anything I've ever done, and I understood why my parents were worried. But I was determined that I was going to act; Jim wanted to marry me and move to Tennessee, and no matter how much I might have preferred to plan a wedding and to stay in LA, I was going to do this his way. I didn't want a lot of time to think about it, and I never second-guessed. I just did it. Though previously, any thought of change had terrified me, now I was finding it wonderfully exhilarating, if somewhat scary, to be taking this huge step forward, and I plunged myself into the prospect of a new life with him.

On Sunday, February 23, 2003, Jim moved down to Los Angeles to stay with us until he and I took off. My mother said she had never seen me smile with such pure joy as I did that day when he arrived at the house. I could see that she was beginning to understand how good he was for me, which was a relief, because the next day Jim and I told my parents that the party we were having on Saturday was actually going to be our wedding. I will never forget my mother's face when she realized I was giving her only five days to prepare.

We got married in my parents' living room on Saturday, March 1,2003, in a lovely ceremony that is one of the times of my life that I am deeply grateful I will always remember with perfect clarity. We invited seventy-five people, and I was appreciative that Jim's ex-wife had agreed to let their boys come. The house was filled with candles, the pool lights glistened outside, and the night was so magical that I felt as if I was hovering above things—almost the way that people describe an out-of-body experience. I had waited my whole life to get married and there I was, so happy that I felt as if I was floating.

A week after our wedding, we took off on our adventure across the country, leaving early in the morning on Saturday, March 8. We stopped in Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Amarillo, and Little Rock before we arrived in Springfield, Tennessee, near the Kentucky border, at 3:00 on Tuesday afternoon, March 11, 2003. The next day we toured Springfield, checking in at a real estate agency and talking to the dean at a school where we thought we might enroll the boys. Our plan was that they would be joining us in September. That night, though, when Jim talked to the boys, we both knew as soon as he hung up that the move wasn't feeling right. The boys had told him how much they missed him, and Jim was torn up by the idea of going six months without them. He looked miserable when he went to sleep, and the next morning when he woke up, he turned to me, apologized, and said, “I can't do it. I'm too far away from them. Can we please go back?” To his great surprise, I was elated. I would have moved to Timbuktu with him if that was where he wanted to go, but I was hugely relieved that where he really wanted to be was back in California. We left Springfield at 1:00
P.M.
on Thursday, March 13, forty-six hours after arriving, and we turned back into my driveway in Encino on Sunday, March 16, at 5:00
P.M.

We moved in with my parents to give us time to figure out a new long-term plan that we'd be truly happy with. Then our life together started to take a scary turn. Jim had been diagnosed when he was thirty-eight with type 1 diabetes, and that news had been hard for him to accept. In some kind of perverse denial, he hadn't been taking the medication that was prescribed to him, and now that neglect was starting to catch up with him. On Monday, April 7, when he got out of bed, he fell, and by the time we went to the doctor later that day, he had started to have a tingling feeling in his feet, a common symptom of type 1 diabetes caused by nerve damage. The doctor wrote him a prescription and told him he needed to start taking better care of himself.

Even as he was facing his own issues, Jim was a constant support for me as I confronted the fast-approaching ordeal of our move out of the house. It was sold in mid-April, and we were scheduled to move over the Fourth of July weekend. My parents and Jim started to pack up the house on Sunday, June 22, 2003, and I was told to start packing the remainder of my things at that point. Even with as much as I had moved out into the storage container, I still had piles of things packed away in my bedroom. I kept saying that it would be taken care of by the time the movers arrived. But every time I tried to pack something, I'd wind up emotionally distraught, with memories coursing through my mind. Days went by, and then late on the Fourth of July, I finally committed myself to tackling it. I told Jim he'd have to sleep in the other room, because I'd be packing all night. But I was incapacitated. At 6:00
A.M.,
I woke Jim up and told him I needed his help. As I lay in bed in tears, he packed the whole room up.

Even then, though, there was one last thing not packed: a strip of wallpaper on which I had been writing notes about my life since 1977. The wallpaper notations started when I was eleven years old—on January 19, 1977, to be exact. That first day, I had just signed my name and the date. As time went on I added more notes, just a little bit about the day, like “100 degrees outside” or “Happy 30th Birthday,” always with the date. Suddenly I became a complete wreck about leaving this piece of wallpaper, with twenty-six years of personal history written on it, behind, and I became determined that I was going to get it off the wall if it was the last thing I did. I had everyone trying to think of ways to get it off the wall, and ultimately I had to scrape it off with a razor. It took ninety minutes of sweat, and many tears, but I did it. It was in pieces, but it was off! Today it is wrapped carefully in a box in my keepsake trunk. The wall did not fare so well, and I hoped the new owners would forgive me.

By mid-July Jim and I were settled in my parents' new home, and we were both working. I had a job working on a television special, and he had taken a job as the mechanic for a car dealership where my friend's husband worked. Best of all, the boys were staying with us.

Then I had another exciting experience with the scientists. In June 2003, they had asked me if I would be willing to come down to UCI for a presentation of their initial findings to the university's medical community, known as Grand Rounds, which was scheduled for Wednesday, August 13. The date finally came, and I found myself feeling up and excited. The idea of being presented to a whole room full of doctors was anxiety provoking, but the scientific work was exciting to me, and as I drove to Irvine that day, I was determined to conquer my fears and do whatever they needed.

Grand Rounds was held in a large lecture hall on the first floor of one of the medical buildings, and I waited in the lobby outside the lecture hall while Dr. McGaugh and Dr. Parker introduced to those in the room the work they had done with me. When Dr. Parker finally came and brought me into the lecture hall, I made myself focus entirely on Dr. McGaugh, who was sitting at a table in the front of the room with a big whiteboard on the wall behind him. He asked me to tell the story of how I had contacted him, why I e-mailed him, and to describe our first meeting. More than fifty doctors were sitting there, dead quiet, staring at me.

Dr. McGaugh asked me to do my diagrams on the whiteboard, and I drew the time line of history, from 1900 to the present, and also the circles that I see for years. He pointed out that it was of interest to him that the diagram of the way I see the time line would be considered backward for most people, as it is drawn from right to left. He also commented that it was unclear if or in what way these visuals might cause my ability to know the exact day of the week a date falls on.

After the presentation, the doctors came by to say how fascinating this was. Some of Dr. Parker's students stuck around and asked me a host of questions about what it's like to remember everything and what I meant when I said I just “see” the day I'm remembering. I could see that they found my recall abilities hard to fathom. It was at this point that I began to believe that perhaps my memory might actually lead to some kind of contribution, whether in explaining normal memory or perhaps solving some mystery about how to treat memory loss. As Dr. Parker would put it to me some time later, some scientific work has the effect of opening up a window onto new terrain that is rich for study, and that, she said, was what my case would be doing.

Doing Grand Rounds was like someone showing me a different vision of myself, one of a person with a rare condition that might be able to help people someday, and that was another turning point for me in coping with my memory. My work with the scientists would take another significant break after this, but at least I was assured that they would be continuing their investigations, and I felt confident that they were going to find answers of some kind that would explain to me why my mind worked the way it did.

Jim had helped me to loosen my emotional grip on my past, and the scientists were now giving me hope that somehow some good might come out of the bizarre phenomenon I'd been living with inside my head. I wasn't feeling so alone with the swirling of my memories anymore, and I felt that I was now on the path toward breaking free from my fear of the future and my obsession with the past. With Jim, I was finally beginning to live the life I had envisioned for myself when I was a small child.

Jim and I knew we wanted a family, and we were delighted when I became pregnant in September 2003. A few weeks later, to our great disappointment, I had a miscarriage. That was quite a blow—to learn all at once that I'd finally been starting on the family I'd always wanted, but that it wasn't going to work out this time. But Jim insisted that we would keep trying, and he promised me that before long, I'd be pregnant again. For Thanksgiving 2003 Jim and I went up to Napa, and I met his parents and the rest of his family. They were a big group, and suddenly, I had two brothers, one sister, and two sisters-in-law, twenty-two nieces and nephews, and one great-niece.

In the new year, Jim and I enjoyed a wonderful stretch of months, spending lots of time together and beginning to focus on longer-term plans. The boys came again for a month in the summer. My parents and Jim had become very close, and my brother, Michael, had fallen in love with him too. I was finally truly looking forward to my future.

Then in August 2004, Jim began feeling strange in a way that he found hard to describe; he couldn't pinpoint what the sensation was like, but he wasn't feeling right. My mother was concerned that it was his diabetes, and she regularly urged him to get himself checked out, but he was stubborn and he had a psychological block about the diabetes. He didn't seem to want to believe it was really a problem. On September 1, he was working outside in 108 degree heat and became extremely dehydrated. By the time he got home that night, he was feeling horrible, and the next day he stayed home. On Friday, September 3, 2004, we woke up and he said to me, “I don't want to scare you, but my whole left side is numb.”

Terrified, I called 911, and we were at the hospital all day. They took test after test but could not find anything wrong, and without giving him a clear diagnosis, they finally sent him home. He began to feel a little better on Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend, though when my parents had a party that Monday, Jim didn't come out of our room the entire day. He told me he thought he'd be well enough to go back to work on Tuesday, but that morning, I couldn't wake him up, and I was so unnerved that I went to get my mom and together we shook him. Finally he opened his eyes, and he stared at me with a look of such fright that it terrified me. I thought he might be in diabetic shock, and this time I couldn't even wait for an ambulance. We took him to the hospital ourselves. The doctors ran tests on him and he stayed overnight, and the next day he was told that his diabetes was the problem and that he had to start taking it much more seriously.

The reality that the disease was catching up with him seemed to have hit him very hard, and that Friday, he quit his job and took off for Napa. He hadn't said a word to me that he was leaving, but I did discover that he'd left me a letter in our mailbox. I went into a kind of emotional shock as I read it; just like that, our marriage was over. For the next three days, I was almost catatonic, holed up at home clutching his letter in disbelief. Even his ex-wife called me to say how shocked she was. Then at 6:00
P.M.
on Tuesday, September 14, Jim called. As soon as I heard his voice I started to cry. I told him that if he wanted to stay up in Napa, I would move up there and that I didn't care about anything but being with him. To my enormous relief, he answered that I didn't need to do that because he was coming back to LA. He came home a week later. As he sat on our bed with tears rolling down his cheeks trying to explain, I just kissed him on his face and that was that. He was back. It was done. We never spoke of it again. I wish I could say that was the end of the drama in our lives, but fate had more in store for us.