THE NEXT DAY Joan started taking down all the Christmas decorations inside the house, except for the tree, in preparation for Taylor’s birthday on the thirtieth because she wanted Taylor to have her own, separate holiday.
“No combo celebrations,” she said.
On the twenty-ninth Grant came over to help strip off the exterior lights. Although the sixty-five-degree weather wasn’t anywhere near heat-stroke temperatures, he was sweating and looked noticeably pale.
Some of the bulbs had burned out, and Joan had already bought a new set of lights for the next year, but Grant made the simple removal job harder than it needed to be. As he ripped off the plastic cord in an agitated frenzy, he cursed when the lights didn’t come loose easily, then tossed and broke them on the front walkway.
I’d heard people cursing on The Sopranos and in movies I’d been watching and asked Joan what some of the words meant.
“Ass is another name for butt,” she said, warning me before I repeated any of the other words, which she said were generally considered inappropriate. “We try not to swear, especially around the kids.”
So, hearing my son spouting expletives that afternoon, I came outside to investigate. “What the hell are you yelling about?” I asked. “God, Grant, you’re making a mess.”
“What’s the difference, we’re throwing them out anyway,” Grant retorted, continuing to swear as he tore the cord from the roof.
“Well, I would rather get up on the ladder and do it myself than listen to you yell,” I snapped. Even in my fragile state, I preferred to risk further injury than let the neighbors hear any more of his tantrum.
“Fine, you can do it then,” he said, climbing down and storming off.
With my head pounding, I pulled myself up the steps and heard Joan scolding Grant. “I can’t believe you let him climb that ladder when he just had a head injury,” she said.
I’d pulled down five feet of lights when Joan made a beeline for me. “What’s going on? I could hear you guys yelling.”
I filled her in, and she told me to come down. “I will do this,” she said. “I don’t want you on a ladder.”
I knew she was probably right, so I did as instructed. Grant came back outside with a bottle of water and finally did as I asked, unhooking each light from its eyelet and handing the cord down to Joan while I watched, red in the face from the pain and irritation.
“I just don’t feel good,” Grant said. “I don’t want to do this.”
When he finished twenty minutes later, he mumbled that he was leaving and sped off in his 1998 Honda Accord.
“I don’t know much,” I said, “but I wouldn’t think I’d let my dad get on a ladder if he’d just gotten out of the hospital. What is with this kid?”
I couldn’t understand how or why my only son would act so selfish and uncaring after crying so hard over my injury at the hospital. It just didn’t make sense.
The next day marked Taylor’s seventeenth birthday, which started off with another family tradition. Joan said we always served each other breakfast in bed on birthdays, so Joan and I made Taylor pancakes with a glass of chocolate milk and chatted with her in her bedroom while she ate.
Even though I’d been up most of the night again and my head felt like it was in a vise, I was not going to miss participating in this family ritual. I knew from all of Joan’s efforts to make this day special for Taylor that celebrating birthdays was something I needed to learn how to do. I wanted to please Joan and Taylor, and I figured I’d better get used to doing things when I was in too much pain to enjoy them. At the same time, I didn’t want my pain to distract or take away from Taylor’s day. I didn’t know the name for this emotion yet, but I was feeling guilty about my accident and how it was affecting my family.
Taylor spent the rest of the morning and afternoon with her boyfriend, Anthony, while Joan and I relaxed and wrapped her presents: a bottle of Juicy Couture perfume and some designer clothes she’d wanted.
That evening Joan and I took Taylor to P.F. Chang’s, her favorite Chinese restaurant, where Grant met us and behaved badly.
Joan’s parents and Anthony joined us at the house for dessert and the opening of gifts.
Joan had prepared me for what we did on Christmas, but she didn’t give me a heads-up about what happened next, and I didn’t like surprises. She turned off the lights in the kitchen, where we were sitting around the table, with an ice cream cake in the middle, and everyone started to sing. But there was only one problem: I did not know the words to the birthday song. Feeling very uncomfortable, I watched everyone else and tried to mimic the words by mouthing along. I’m sure I was way off, but I didn’t like looking stupid because it was such a basic tune, so I tried to appear as if I was keeping up.
I soon learned that I could feel a little less overwhelmed and frustrated at how much I didn’t know by actively learning whatever I could in any way that I could. Watching TV seemed the simplest, fastest, and most comprehensive method, and it became like a life-sustaining medication that was just as important as my painkillers, if not more so. It also helped me cope while I suffered from severe insomnia.
In the beginning I’d get so tired that I’d go to bed at 9:00 P.M. Joan lay down with me and rubbed my chest until I fell asleep, then left and came back to bed an hour or so later when she felt tired. At first I was scared when she got into bed with me, and although I wasn’t as uncomfortable with her touching me as I’d been in the hospital, I was still feeling uneasy about it. I wondered if I should say something or just let it go, and I decided to choose the latter. I wanted to do everything normally—act the way I used to—and I figured the best way to do that was to follow her lead. It took me a few days to get used to it, and then it was okay. In fact, I grew to enjoy the attention.
As time went on, Joan and I went to bed together around 10:00 or 10:30 P.M., but I was lucky if I fell asleep for an hour or two before waking up and going to my chair in the living room, where I sat up for the rest of the night, flipping around the two-hundred-plus channels on DirecTV. The satellite service offered me a channel for almost any topic I could want, from business or political news to stock market tips, sports, cooking, history, and movies. With my fallback standard, Fox News, starting up at 3:00 A.M., I never had a problem finding something to watch. Some nights I couldn’t fall asleep at all, and if I dozed off for an hour in the afternoon, that would be the only sleep I’d get for forty-eight hours.
Often the pain was so bad that I’d have to take my medication before I even lay down, so it became a challenge of timing. The pills took up to forty-five minutes to work, and I had to take them every four hours to focus on anything, including sleep. Frequently I’d have to get by with just resting my eyes while I listened to the TV. Joan didn’t tell me this at the time, but the Percocet often made me quite irritable. I couldn’t figure this out for myself, of course, because I had no basis for comparison.
The basic knowledge I gained from watching around-the-clock TV—stopping only to sleep, to eat, to talk with Joan or Taylor, or to take the occasional trip out of the house—helped shape my immediate responses to whatever was going on around me. Over time I would come to understand that the world I saw on sitcoms and in movies was far from the real world, but it did allow me to form a basic understanding of our culture.
It was still difficult for me to learn and retain information, so I used any tool that helped me remember things. I often scrambled the days of the week, for example, or forgot the names of certain days.
One day I saw a commercial for the NuvaRing, the once-a-month contraceptive device. Now, I didn’t really understand what this was or why they’d advertise a product for such a private purpose on television. But the ad, which featured women ripping off the midsections of their yellow bathing suits and swimming together like they were dancing, did teach me something else. The commercial was annoying, but its catchy tune listed all the days of the week, which helped me remember them in the proper order. I couldn’t get this song out of my head for months, which meant I never forgot this information again.
Later, Joan and I were watching a documentary on Olympic training that showed women doing the same kind of swim-dancing, and I said, “Hey, that’s just like the NuvaRing commercial.”
When she explained that this was called synchronized swimming, which had its own Olympic event, I realized that the ad had been educational in more ways than one.
My headaches continued virtually round the clock, and even though I managed to watch endless TV shows, I never seemed to complete a full program because my attention span was so short. Constantly changing the channel, I could watch a show or movie repeatedly without seeing the same scenes twice.
Joan and the kids encouraged me to watch movies I’d liked before or were family favorites. In turn, I shared with them movies I thought were good, only to be told that we’d already seen them countless times. It was reassuring to know that some of my likes and dislikes had remained the same, that I might not be as different as I felt.
Maybe everything about me hasn’t changed. Maybe it just feels that way because it’s all new to me.
Wanting to blend in with the people around me and be able to hold an intelligent conversation, I tried to absorb as much information as I could about real life. I figured that everyone was educated about world events, and to prevent anyone from thinking I was ignorant or lacked a general knowledge of these topics, I watched shows on CNN, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Military Channel. But because I lacked context, it was difficult sometimes for me to differentiate between breaking news and old news footage, like the space shots I saw in the Apollo 13 movie.
I’d had no preconceived notion about our planet, but I was still surprised to learn that the earth was round. I was also intrigued to hear that so few people had traveled into space and that the universe never ended. It seemed that so little was known about space—or how the brain worked, for that matter—that after watching documentaries on the subject, I figured I knew as much as most anyone else. I also learned about our history of wars and foreign conflicts, feeling surprised and saddened that so many young men my son’s age from all over the globe had died, and were still dying, in battle; I’d assumed that most soldiers would be closer to my age. I also didn’t understand why many of these wars got started, and all the differing opinions I kept hearing about this didn’t help me form one of my own.
Watching the brave soldiers fight for our country made me wish that I’d joined the military. It seemed like such a noble, honorable thing to do because my country was something worth protecting. Joan said she thought I’d been accepted at the Air Force Academy when I was younger, but she wasn’t sure. So I asked my mom, and she said that I’d been recruited during my senior year of high school—and even had been endorsed by a congressman—but I’d chosen to go to Northern Illinois University instead.
It made me a little crazy to watch footage of other major historical events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because I knew I must have known these things before, and yet I had no recollection. I still didn’t have a good grasp of time, but I could do the math, piecing together that I’d been about a year old when Kennedy was shot.
I felt myself absorbing lots of information from these programs, but I always felt stressed about whether I was gathering the right information—and enough of it—to carry on a normal existence outside the cocoon of my house. Also, the more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. I didn’t realize, of course, that this is true for many people because the amount of information available to us these days is almost infinite. It’s just that most people don’t experience as much fear or anxiety as I did from such an epiphany because the gaps in my knowledge and experience were so vast.
But I could go even deeper into the emotional vortex than that. Watching shows such as The First 48 on A&E, which documents the activities of homicide detectives and crime scene investigators during the crucial first forty-eight hours after a murder is committed, I was amazed at how they put clues together to solve these crimes. And yet I also found myself wishing that I was one of the victims. I figured my family would be better off that way, not having to live with someone who had changed and forgotten so much, someone who didn’t know if he’d ever get better or, God forbid, got even worse. It’s not that I was feeling suicidal—I didn’t even know what suicide was—nor was I worried about becoming a homicide victim; it was simply a potential method of relieving my mental and physical pain. Of course, I never told Joan about these dark thoughts; I didn’t want to make her pain and anguish any worse.
Things weren’t always dark for me, though. Every day I woke up hoping that my memory would come back and I could return to my previous life. The doctors had said this would happen, and Joan and I were trying our best to be optimistic, but we were getting a bit impatient. We wanted to know what was going on in my brain. But that didn’t change the fact that I didn’t know how to exist in the meantime. Joan told me I’d been a solution-seeking guy before, and that hadn’t changed. So, rather than sit hopelessly by and wait, I just kept flipping the remote, which never left my hand. It was something I could do on my own, and I could use what I learned to become more independent, all of which helped me get through the day.
Photos, with Joan to narrate the backstory, became another important way for me to learn about who I was, what I’d done, and where we’d been together. Joan had started organizing our twenty-seven years’ worth of photos together into cardboard photo storage boxes, categorized and divided by month, year, and subject and kept in her home office. Sometimes she’d mention a place like SeaWorld, I’d ask what it was, and she’d say, “You want me to show you a photo of when we went there?”
Depending on how bad my headache was and also on how much information I’d already taken in that day, I’d either say “yes” or “not right now.”
One day I was going through some stuff in my office when I came across two quilted binders on a shelf.
“What are those?” I asked Joan.
Joan said they contained Grant’s and Taylor’s early childhood photos and mementos, compiled in a personalized album made by a friend of my mother’s. Taryn’s was in the safe.
“Do you want to see the baby photos?” she asked.
I agreed, thinking this would be a good way to learn about my kids, my life as a father and husband, and more about the child we’d lost. Joan pulled the two scrapbooks off the shelf, then punched in the combination on the safe to retrieve Taryn’s album. She breathed a deep sigh as she pulled it out and held it with great affection as she placed it with the others on the ottoman in front of my big chair.
We sat in my chair together as Joan slowly turned the eight-by-ten-inch pages documenting my children’s beginnings. Even though Taryn had been born first, we started with Grant. It was clear from Joan’s reaction going through the ornaments, and now this, that Taryn’s would be the toughest for her to get through.
The front of Grant’s album featured a photo of him as a newborn, wearing a tiny skullcap. The picture was framed with a series of progressively larger rectangles, covered in soft white cotton with a pattern of little pastel-colored numbers and football icons, similar to an athletic shirt, and bordered with blue lace.
Inside, two ultrasound images were mounted on the first page.
“You can see inside where Grant was growing,” Joan said, but I was baffled.
As she described how the baby grew in her stomach, I was able to conceptualize the idea, but I still couldn’t make out the actual shape of the baby in all those black and gray shadows. I also had a hard time figuring out how the baby came out, although I didn’t ask because I was trying to build trust with this woman and I didn’t want her to think, “How do you not know this?”
Next came a page with four hospital bracelets, two each for Grant and Joan. For once, I actually knew what these were because I’d worn one myself. There were also photos of a much younger Joan with brown hair, and me standing behind her with my hand on her pregnant belly.
When we got to the photos of Grant’s christening, Joan tried to explain in simple terms what that was all about, but religion was somewhat complicated for me to understand, so I just nodded.
Taylor’s album was more feminine, covered with bright red cotton and a border of white frilly lace, her name and birth date stitched in red and blue in the center of a heart. It too contained ultrasound images, hospital bracelets, and newborn photos.
I enjoyed watching Joan’s face light up as she showed me a photo of her smiling as two-and-a-half-year-old Grant kissed her beach-ball-size stomach. I could see how special and sweet that moment must have been for all of us.
One photo featured me cutting something attached to Taylor’s belly in the hospital. “What is that?” I asked. “It looks like a rope.”
“That’s the umbilical cord,” Joan explained. “That’s how the baby is connected to the mother and gets its food and oxygen.”
“Did I want to do that?”
“Yes, that’s what fathers do.”
In Taylor’s christening photo, she wore a white silk gown as she sat propped up against a pillow on the couch. She was sandwiched between two-and-a-half-year-old Grant, dressed in a suit and tie, and his slightly older cousin, Sydney, both of them holding Taylor’s hands. There was also a photo of her white sheet cake, with Congratulations, Taylor etched in pink icing.
Finally, on the last page, there was a photo of me, my mouth wide open, laughing, and holding a girl’s shoe that was covered in mud. Joan chuckled as she told me the story of how my twelve-year-old niece, Jamie, had gotten stuck in the mud and lost her shoe the day of Taylor’s christening while trying to fetch a ball in the back of our house. I’d gone after her, rescued her and the shoe, and ended up covered in mud.
It did us both good to laugh and appreciate the humor of the situation. It made me feel closer to Joan when we could share the same emotion in the present, particularly when it involved something from our past. That said, it was still difficult when Joan started tearing up because I felt that I was supposed to be weeping too, only I usually didn’t feel the same level of sadness.
That was not the case as we looked through Taryn’s album. We both cried as Joan turned the pages, especially when we got to the photos of our baby girl, her eyes closed and her face and tiny body marked with purple patches, a pattern called lividity that I learned forms when the heart stops pumping and blood pools at the lowest point of gravity. The celluloid pages contained a locket of her hair, her teeny footprints, her birth certificate, and finally two photos of her grave, taken on different trips. One of them showed a bronze vase of fresh sunflowers, petunias, and calla lilies and the other a collection of balloons and flower baskets.
I now had the story of the ornaments and these photos to help put the memory of Taryn together, but I still had no emotional attachment to our firstborn child. And that only made me feel more confused, lost, and empty. I could see Joan’s grief, which still seemed so raw, when she talked about our first daughter. I wanted to feel that same pain again because she’d explained how we’d shared it over the years and how it had strengthened the bond between us. Unlike my headaches, this wasn’t a pain I would dread or merely endure. This was one I would welcome.