Free I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck

friends and family). I think I was somehow “fast-tracked” out of the hospital, either because of Jim’s behavior or our medical insurance coverage. All of a sudden, people started writing in my chart that my problem was most likely something psychological rather than physical, and I was shown the door.
    My sister Barb is convinced that it was too early for me to gohome. To this day she tells me, “You were not ready. You should have gone to a rehab facility, or you should have gone home with a crew of therapists; someone to help you with speech, a physical therapist to help with gross motor skills, and an occupational therapist to help with fine-motor tasks. You couldn’t write. Walking and moving around was hard for you. You couldn’t even use your left side, and you were left-handed! And you had two little kids.” Barb never thought it was a good idea for me to go home when I did, but as she tells it, “I couldn’t do anything about it. And you couldn’t do anything about it. You didn’t know anything. I couldn’t really talk to Jim. He wasn’t there to listen.”
    Let’s think about this for a second, shall we? And part of this will just be me speculating, of course. Did I know who I was? After three weeks in the hospital? I probably knew my name was Su Meck. Did I know Jim, Benjamin, and Patrick? Did I understand husband? Marriage? Son? Brother? Mother? Father? Did I make connections as to who these people were in relationship to me? My guess is no, I didn’t. I probably didn’t have a clue as to how to take care of myself, let alone two very young boys. Was going home to a house I didn’t know, with a family that might just as well have been assigned to me, really a safe, smart, logical next step? Looking back, I don’t think it was safe, smart, or logical. And yet, that is exactly what happened.
    I may never know why. Maybe Jim didn’t have a choice. Maybe it was some kind of insurance decision. If the insurance company decided that I was well enough, they may have put pressure on the doctors to have me released. Jim certainly would not have been able to pay my medical expenses without insurance. Was Jim ever told what services may have been available to me once I was home? He tells me he doesn’t remember anything like that ever being discussed. Ifind myself wondering, Why didn’t Jim ask? But I have to keep telling myself, all of this was happening and all of these decisions were being made when Jim was just twenty-four years old.

    Whatever the reason, I was released from the hospital and taken to live in a house I did not remember. The 1970s gold-flecked linoleum and shag carpeting, the green scratchy couch, the brown kitchen cupboards, the large backyard surrounded by a privacy fence: None of these things registered with me. Jim remembers me walking hesitantly down the hallway that led from the family room back to the bedrooms. He recalls me just staring at all of the family photographs that were hanging there. “That’s me!” I said, pointing to my image. “And that’s me, too!” I recognized myself in the more recent photographs, but I had no recollection of the places where even a single one of the pictures had been taken, or any of the stories behind them. I was not able to identify any of the other people—other friends and family—in the photos. It was sort of like being airbrushed into a life. A real-life Twilight Zone.
    I walked into the kitchen and opened every single cupboard and drawer. There was nothing recognizable about any of this stuff. I probably didn’t even know what most of the items were called, or what they could possibly be used for. The hospital was all I knew. Everything in this house was unfamiliar, and I can only imagine how bewildering and daunting that unfamiliarity would have been to me. What would it have felt like for me to not know even the names of objects in my own home? But then I think, did I even care? Did I ask questions, or was I just too