Free The Vow: The True Events That Inspired the Movie by Kim Carpenter, Krickitt Carpenter, Dana Wilkerson Page B

to me in the most encouraging way he could. He told me that the accident actually had caused two kinds of amnesia. The first, post-traumatic amnesia, was a temporary confusion about where she was and what was going on around her. For Krickitt, this type of amnesia was already wearing away, and it would soon disappear completely.
    The second type of amnesia was more distressing, at least for me. Krickitt also had retrograde amnesia, a permanent loss of short-term memory. We already knew she had regained her memory of people and events from the distant past. She remembered her parents, brother, and sister-in-law. She remembered her old roommate Lisa. She even remembered her old boyfriend Todd, which didn’t bring me great joy. But she could remember nothing from the previous year and a half. And what had happened during those months? My wife and I had met, dated, gotten engaged, gotten married, had our honeymoon in Hawaii, and started our life together in Las Vegas. She didn’t remember any of it; she didn’t even remember anything about the accident.
    Over the next few days I prayed a lot about the future— our future. Ever since I had watched the EMTs work on Krickitt while she was still strapped upside down in our car, my whole existence had been focused on getting her back. Miraculously, God had saved her life, and I had been impatient to pick up where we left off and build a future together. But that assumed we would be building on a shared past. Suddenly the past was gone. Now I had no idea when, if ever, my wife’s memory would return. Yet I knew that no matter what happened, I had made a vow not just before our friends and family, but also before God. I was Krickitt’s husband, for better or for worse. And this was just about the worst I could imagine.
    As I lay awake each night praying and thinking about how I was going to adapt to this new life, I would be afraid one minute, mad the next, and everlastingly confused. All kinds of questions flew through my mind. What will life be like from now on? What kind of person will Krickitt turn out to be? Will she always be different? Is the young woman I married still in there, or is she gone for good? When will we know that her recovery has stopped—that she has improved as much as she is going to? It was all I thought about. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t relax, and I couldn’t get rid of the stress. Though Krickitt still had a chance to recover part of her lost memory, the doctors had told me there were some things she would never remember. The most agonizing question of all was: Would one of those things be me? I quickly put that thought from my mind. I couldn’t bear to contemplate the fact that my wife might never remember me.

    Krickitt soon got into a routine with her therapy, and we saw steady progress in her coordination, walking, speech, and reasoning. Everything was a process, though. For example, when she started walking on her own, she jerked her right foot forward, then dragged the left one on the floor behind her. Gradually the movement got smoother and more natural. Before long she could dress by herself, eat, and take care of all the basic necessities of life.
    During those first weeks of rehabilitation, Krickitt didn’t seem to mind me being around, but she talked to me like she talked to all the other familiar faces in the rehab center. At first she was cordial, even friendly, but our interactions were without any depth or dimension. They were strictly surface conversations.
    Scott Madsen, Krickitt’s physical therapist, was an energetic trainer who had a special gift for encouraging his patients to do just a little more every day than they thought they could possibly do. His plan for Krickitt’s therapy included time on the treadmill, working with hand weights, and a range of exercises designed to help her get as much flexibility and strength back as possible.
    As a coach, I watched Scott’s process carefully. I considered that a physical