I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia

by Su Meck

  Every year for almost the past thirty years, Neal has driven to Valley Forge on September 17 to mark our “first date” anniversary. He walks along old hiking trails that he and I had hiked together, and remembers what was. It is a sweet and yet heart-wrenching tradition. I try to grasp what Neal tells me, and understand that tradition, but I never will completely appreciate his September 17 ritual simply because Valley Forge Park is just a tourist destination to me.

  In a Facebook exchange on June 24, 2011, two days into our new relationship, I told Neal how nervous I had been during the Today show interview. I wrote, “I hate when people ask, ‘What is your first memory?’ I just want to ask them what their first memory is!” Neal replied, “OMG! This is the first time since we reconnected that you really sound like the girl I used to know! I love it!”

  It was the first time anyone from my old life had ever told me I sounded like the old me. Was Neal saying it merely because he wanted me to be the same girl? Was he living a fantasy, imagining me as a perpetual eighteen-year-old? Or did he really think that I was the same person now as then? I have to wonder what he would have thought if we had reconnected ten years earlier. Back then, I had very little sense of humor, and I mostly just parroted things other people said. I didn’t think for myself then. I do now. Or at least more than I used to.

  We began sharing more details of nearly three lost decades, and Neal ticked off an ever more impressive list of accomplishments. “We have lived in several cities all over the world,” he wrote, but “Monte Carlo is my favorite place in the world.” On his fortieth birthday, Neal and a friend went heli-skiing in New Zealand. Neal has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He knows enough of seven languages to get around. He was once head chef at a three-star restaurant.

  Though he probably didn’t mean it, Neal and his stories were starting to make me jealous. He was so successful, so well traveled, such a great father, husband, and chef, while my life had felt like one battle after another, and my kids subsisted mostly on mac and cheese. The more I heard about Neal, the more I wanted to know him, and to see him. Was he leading me on? Was this old boyfriend too good to be true? Can a person really be that sweet, successful, and smart?

  If Neal wanted a reaction, he got one. On June 25, three days after our first message, I had lunch with an old friend from high school. I told her about Neal. At the mention of his name, my friend turned white, looked surprised, and just stared at me for a moment. Then she caught herself and tried to recover as she told me that, yes, she had some vague memories of him. I threw the bullshit flag, sensing there was something she wasn’t telling me. She sighed and began to confess. She proceeded to tell me a story that would change my life. Again.

  In fall of 1983, I left for college very much in love with Neal Moore, much to the chagrin of my girlfriends, some of whom were still in high school at Conestoga. They didn’t like Neal, because I wasn’t nearly as “fun” or “crazy” since I had started dating him. It seemed they thought I would be missing some kind of “Total College Experience” by keeping a serious boyfriend, especially someone like Neal, back home. They took it upon themselves, if not to break us up completely, at least to drive a wedge into our relationship. One of these girls wrote to me at college and told me that Neal had been seen with an extremely attractive young woman at the King of Prussia Mall. When approached, Neal had supposedly blown off my friend and told her that if Su had gone all the way to Ohio, he could do whatever he damn well pleased back in Pennsylvania. Upon hearing this (completely untruthful) story, I got really fired up, distraught, angry, hurt. I was totally pissed off. Seizing on my agitated state, one of my friends—my lunch date, in fact—had dared me to sleep with someone at college, anyone really, just to get back at Neal. That guy turned out to be Jim Meck.

  Listening to this story and letting it sink in, I was, on the one hand, sort of amused, thinking back to how young and juvenile we all were. I really was quite the gullible innocent. On the other hand, the more I thought about it, the more I began to get angry. A week earlier, this new narrative wouldn’t have mattered, because I had no stake in my old relationship with Neal. But in my new reality, the tale took on tragic proportions. Over the course of a few days, I had learned, first, that Neal just might have been the love of my life, and, second, that our love had been stolen from us by jealous teenage girls. My so-called friends changed the course of my life with one silly, adolescent prank. That sounds overly dramatic, I know. Who really knows if Neal and I would have survived four years of a long-distance relationship in the eighties, before e-mail, cell phones, texting, Facebook, and Skype? But I guess I would prefer to know for sure, and now there is no way to know.

  That evening, I wrote to Neal. “I just learned today about some very interesting facts about what REALLY happened in 1983–1984 and I am REALLY pissed off!!! It amazes me how people (my so-called best friends at the time) can lie and alter the course of someone’s life . . . and get away with it for so many years!!!” The explosion of capital letters and exclamation points caught Neal off guard. “Calm down,” he wrote. “Let’s talk.” Then he vanished from cyberspace for a full twenty-four hours; maybe I had scared him off, or maybe he just needed time to think. When he resurfaced, he seemed to share my sense of loss.

  “I’m feeling a lot of emotion as things are starting to sink in,” he wrote. “And, like you, I’m pissed off because it doesn’t seem like we even had a chance . . . And there never was anyone else but you. Ask my mother, who kept telling me to let you go and move on.” As Neal processed the new information, the end of our relationship began to make more sense. “There were sooo many questions left unanswered that have plagued me over the years,” he wrote. “Honestly, there hasn’t been a week that has gone by that I haven’t thought about you. You really set the bar for all of my relationships since . . . You weren’t just a girlfriend/lover, but my best friend, and I kept kicking myself as to what went so wrong that we were torn apart so abruptly. We were, at one time, inseparable.”

  In some ways, I don’t know what happened to Neal and me, either. I wasn’t dating Jim then. I had just slept with him once to get back at Neal. Why did I not say any of that to Neal at the time? Why didn’t we talk until we got to the bottom of the situation then? Did I just feel too overwhelmingly guilty? Was I just too afraid of losing Neal altogether?

  I have trouble with virtual reality in the sense that if I haven’t actually previously met somebody who happens to be on the other end of a phone, or e-mail, or text message, that person isn’t “real” to me. It’s hard to explain, but since I had never met Neal in person, he is no more real to me than Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, or the tooth fairy. He sent me a few recent pictures, but unfortunately I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around Neal as an actual person. Instead he has, in my mind, been a sort of pen pal, an unknown entity “out there” that cares for me somehow. We talk and text, telling each other stories and helping each other through crazy things that happen in our lives.

  “I’m sorry for saying what I am going to say next,” I wrote Neal on June 27. “I REALLY want to meet you!!! It doesn’t make ANY sense . . . but there it is!!!” For weeks after that I sent messages, pushing to meet him before we moved to Northampton in August. Neal resisted. “I have three fears in eventually meeting,” he replied. “They are, in no particular order, (1) disappointment that I look older, (2) all your memories come back and you are more angry as to what happened, and (3) no memories are triggered.”

  I have never fully understood Neal’s reluctance to meet. Those fears seem so ridiculous to me. How could he possibly look “older” to me? And as far as memories coming back or not, I have kind of given up on that whole scenario. I have had my hopes raised and then dashed way too many times. But I have fears of my own: maybe Neal has a picture in his mind of Su the eighteen- or nineteen-year-old, and, let’s face it, I am now forty-eight, and really quite a different woman from the one he remembers. Maybe he’s secretly worried he would be
disappointed with how I look now, or how I act, and he wants to preserve me in his mind as a youthful fresh-faced teenager.

  Neal sent me a picture of himself as he looks today. I messaged him as I opened it: “I am staring at your face, trying so hard to remember . . . but there’s nothing. I hate this SO MUCH!” Neal seemed to think that seeing his face would trigger a cascade of old memories. I knew better. I told Neal he had a kind face. He shot back, “Santa has a kind face.” I found that funny, because in my mind he was as unreal as Santa. But I didn’t tell him that.

  For various reasons—time, distance, our separate families, and busy lives—Neal and I have still never met. But we text often and have spoken on the phone maybe a dozen times. It was awkward at first; I have trust issues, particularly after learning all of Jim’s transgressions. I wanted to know if Neal was for real. “You didn’t trust me,” Neal recalls. “You said, ‘How do I know it’s you?’ And I said, ‘You have this scar.’ ” And he described the scar on my abdomen that I have from a stupid adolescent incident in Ocean City. I was beyond shocked. How could this man I’d never met have such knowledge of my body? I demanded, “How do you know that?” Neal said, “I know every inch of your body.”

  Our first conversation was weird and wonderful for both of us. Strange for him because he said I sounded the same as I did when I was eighteen, just as he remembered, and strange for me for the opposite reason; because I didn’t remember him at all. During this phone call, he told me about our first date. It is a story I never tire of hearing.

  It was September 17, 1981, and a friend of mine who was dating one of Neal’s coworkers at a local movie theater set me up with Neal on a blind date. It was the beginning of my junior year in high school, and I was sixteen. I should interject here that I had never really dated in high school. I had a big group of friends with whom I hung out and partied, and because I was a drummer in the band as well as a bit of a jock and a tomboy, I had lots of close guy friends. But not boyfriends, specifically. It brings to mind my mother’s words: “You had only two serious boyfriends in your life . . . Neal and then Jim.”

  On that September evening, Neal arrived at our door, and, in his recollection, “your parents hated me right away.” He was three years older than me; he had just turned nineteen, and he had flamed out of Penn State the previous year. He was living with his parents, but working as a teller in a bank in Philadelphia, and also working at the movie theater so that he could pay for night classes at West Chester State. I seriously doubt my parents hated him—but that’s how he tells it.

  We met my girlfriend and her boyfriend outside the theater. We all went in, purchased huge buckets of popcorn, and proceeded to find seats in the auditorium where we sat and watched the movie Arthur. Who knows why, but we became a bit rambunctious during the movie and began throwing popcorn at each other. Neal says there was popcorn everywhere—in our hair, down his shirt, all over the seats, and on the floor. He told me that, to this day, he still cannot eat popcorn without thinking of that night. He also recalls thinking during the date that I was “way out of his league,” whatever that means, and he thought this would be our one and only date. We exchanged phone numbers, but he never expected to hear from me again. He did not kiss me good night.

  The next day was a Sunday, and I had gone to the library to do some homework. As I opened my purse to get a pen, popcorn came tumbling out onto the table where I was working. I laughed out loud. When I got home, I called Neal and asked if he wanted to go for a walk in Valley Forge Park. After he got past the astonishment that I was really calling him, he agreed to a walk, and he drove down to pick me up. We headed to Valley Forge, parked the Jeep, and began walking on the path that winds for miles through the park. Neal recalls that we were “just talking together about everything.” At some point, I turned to him and asked him straight out, “Why didn’t you kiss me good night last night?” He said that’s what he eventually grew to love about me, my straight forwardness. He said he always knew where I stood; I didn’t play games, although I did enjoy pushing limits. Apparently, I didn’t even wait for him to respond, I just planted a kiss squarely on his lips. He remembers initially being taken aback, but there were quite a few more kisses on that Sunday afternoon.

  It sounds like we spent quite the enjoyable first weekend together. And though I love my family more than anything, part of me will always wish I had been there with Neal.

  Neal and I headed off to my senior prom, May 1983

  24

  Break on Through

  —The Doors

  I was a bit annoyed when the Washington Post article came out in May of 2011, but not because I didn’t like it. The article itself was terrific! What got to me was the fact that it was written as if that was the whole story. To me it was akin to playing one note on a piano and calling it a masterpiece. Jim and I received hundreds of really thoughtful and supportive e-mails from people who had read the Post article assuming that this one account included every bit of information that existed about me and my life struggles, as well as those of my family. The events in the Washington Post article were just one small part of the story, and because of that, the whole story couldn’t really be fully understood or appreciated by people who read it.

  Babies are coddled, nursed, and coaxed into childhood. Not me. I was born into a life already in progress. When I came home from the hospital, I was expected to perform my duties as a wife and mother. But how was I really supposed to do that? I was a mother with no memories of her own childhood or her own mother. I could barely read or write, cook or clean. I hadn’t the slightest idea how to change a diaper or prepare a bottle. I was a wife with no recollection of love, let alone sex. Without knowing it, I was like an actor playing a role that had been assigned to me. I studied what other wives said and did at parties and mimicked their words and gestures. I cooked and cleaned and shopped, not because I wanted to—not because of any choice I had ever made—but because those things were expected of me. My life became a series of precise rules: Make sure you always do this; make sure you never do that.

  The old Su may have longed to finish school, to return to work, to seize all the dreams she had left at the door to motherhood. As for me, this was the only life I had ever known. For years, I had nothing to long for. I had no neglected hobbies, no dormant talents, and no dreams that I knew about. I existed for the sole purpose of serving my husband and children. There was nothing else. There was no other me. And, yes, I was content, because I didn’t know any better.

  For years, I basically just ignored all the things I couldn’t do. They simply didn’t occur to me, and I didn’t have the ability to see myself from anybody else’s perspective. People remember their childhoods. I don’t. People know how to multiply. Not me. People could talk about what they learned in high school and college. Nope. No high school and no college for me to talk about. People remember their birthdays and how old they are. I didn’t remember either, and when I was asked, I would just say the first thing that came into my head. People know how to tie their shoes. There were times when I couldn’t. People know how to read and write. Me? Not really. Mothers tell their children what to do and how to act. My children usually told me. Couples love to tell stories of how they met and fell in love, and stories of the crazy things they did in college. I don’t have those stories.

  It wasn’t until we were back from Cairo in the late 1990s that I began to recognize how different I really was from other people, especially other adults. All this time I had thought I was fine. I never saw myself as a freak or as that weird mother. Jim and I never talked about the injury and its consequences because I didn’t realize there had been any consequences. Without ever meaning to, I had just been faking it most of the time, especially when I was out around others. For more than twenty years, I just hid my condition from the world. I had long ago stopped asking everyone to explain the inexplicable. Early on, I had learned to swallow my questions altogether or to only occasionally ask Jim or
the kids about stuff I didn’t understand. I clung to Jim’s side in public, following his cues, speaking only when I was absolutely sure of the right thing to say. Nobody ever seemed to notice or say anything, at least that I paid attention to. Benjamin, my older son (and later Patrick, and then much later Kassidy), became my accomplice in the Meck home, often parenting me and guiding us through the parking lot to our car and through the subdivision to our home, reminding me to take them to school every morning and to pick them up every afternoon. To educate myself, I eventually taught myself to read my children’s books and over the years copied a lot of their homework assignments. Benjamin, Patrick, and Kassidy have never once said they thought any of that stuff was weird.

  But now I find myself afflicted with a peculiar sort of identity crisis. I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. I have spent almost all my life as I know it trying to make other people happy, trying to convince them that I am normal . . . when now I know I am not. I recognize now that I can’t act and talk the way other people do. I suddenly feel like such a phony.