The Vow

by Kim; Krickitt Carpenter; Dana Wilkerson

  “Before the accident we were caught up in the will to win,” they quoted me as saying. “It took something devastating like this to make me realize that winning is not everything. Until you go through something like this, you don’t understand. My outlook on life in general has changed. You tend to respect life a lot more. My priorities are a little different.” That was an understatement.

  Krickitt’s mom had traveled to Las Vegas with her again, and when we were at the airport on their way back to Phoenix Mary stepped away from us at the gate so Krickitt and I could have a private moment to say good-bye.

  I held her beautiful face in my hands.

  “I love you, Krickitt,” I said.

  “I love you too.” Her mouth spoke, but her eyes said nothing. She gave me a quick hug, like one she might give anyone she was fond of. As we embraced, I shot a quick glance at my mother-in-law across the waiting area. I saw the same aching, overwhelming disappointment in her expression that she could no doubt see in mine.

  Krickitt finally progressed enough that Dr. Singh and the rest of the team at Barrow set a tentative date for her release from the outpatient program. In spite of her memory loss, Krickitt was excited about getting back to Las Vegas. Though she still lashed out at me without any warning, we were definitely beginning to rebuild our relationship.

  On the surface Krickitt was still ambivalent about our relationship. In fact, she didn’t always accept me as her husband. But though I didn’t know it at the time, deep down and in moments of mental clarity, she knew we were married and she wanted the marriage to work.

  Her journal from that time reads, “Dear Lord, . . . I really want to be back with Kimmer and get our new life going again. I am relying on you to restore all of my feelings for our relationship. . . . Thank you for sparing our lives in the accident, and I ask that you would use us for your glory. Please strengthen our marriage and make it even stronger than it was in the beginning. Help us to grow closer together. We give you our trust and thanks. . . . May I become the girl I was and the one you want me to be.”

  Though I didn’t know what was going on in Krickitt’s mind or her heart, I did know that she now missed me on the days I didn’t call or visit. There were even times when she enjoyed being with me and we really seemed to be getting somewhere. I held tight to those moments and frantically tried to figure out what made them work so I could hopefully try to create them more often.

  As Krickitt’s release date approached, we both felt the strain of not knowing for sure whether she would be allowed to leave the program and come back to Las Vegas. They took note of her astonishing progress and reported, “She is very eager to return to her husband in New Mexico.” Although she had made huge strides in her recovery, she still had some physical limitations. For instance, she couldn’t qualify to get her driver’s license back yet because she had intermittent vision problems. But in the end everybody signed off on her release, and on April 14, 1994, Krickitt came home.

  Four days later we celebrated our seven-month anniversary. At that point Krickitt had spent two-thirds of our married life as a hospital patient, and I had spent two-thirds of our married life wondering if my wife would ever remember that she had, indeed, married me.

  Though I had tried to prepare myself for Krickitt’s reentry into life in New Mexico, it didn’t take long to realize our life together was a disaster in the making. We couldn’t relax around each other. Even though she had missed me when I was away, she still didn’t always accept the fact that we were married, and she didn’t know how to live as part of a married couple.

  A few days after she got home, I found her standing in the middle of the kitchen with a confused look on her face. I asked her what she was thinking about.

  After taking a minute to formulate the words, she said, “How did I do the wife thing?”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “You know, the wife thing. Did I cook for you? Did I make you lunch? Did I wave to you when you left in the morning? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’m so confused. I know I’m supposed to be married to you. I know I like you and miss you when you’re gone.” She paused before continuing, “I know you’ve been so faithful. You’re always there when I need you. I know these things. I know them. But I don’t know I’m married to you. I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  When I would leave for work in the mornings, I had no choice but to leave Krickitt alone in the apartment. I was worried about the prospect, because I remembered how she had always wanted to leave the hospital in Phoenix and go for a walk. I was afraid that she would go for a walk here and get disoriented.

  “Promise me you won’t run off and get lost,” I said.

  “I promise,” she answered softly.

  Just a day or two later, we got into an argument and before I knew it she was gone. I found her a half mile away. She had found a pay phone and had called her mom.

  “You promised me you wouldn’t run away,” I said firmly when we got back to the apartment.

  “I can’t promise you anything!” she shouted, then ran into the bedroom and slammed the door.

  “Krickitt!” I shouted.

  “Go away! I hate you!” She screamed. Then I heard her dissolve into heaving sobs of frustration and rage. I walked away and waited for her to calm down.

  And so it went. We would have sweet times of companionship and rebuilding that were suddenly interrupted by the temper outbursts of an unruly teenager. There would be instances when she completely lost control, quickly followed by periods of fear and confusion about her behavior.

  Though things were tumultuous at home, I was relieved that I no longer had to make the weekly commute to Phoenix. Staying in one place gave me the chance to settle back into my coaching duties and concentrate on building a winning team. I needed something successful in my life like I’d never needed it before.

  The downside was that there was nowhere I could go to get away from the pressure. Since my home life was such a disaster, I was too tired and stressed to be the coach my team needed and deserved. Krickitt was improving from a medical standpoint, but our relationship was in ruins. We were living together but not living as husband and wife. Our interactions were still more like father and daughter or coach and athlete.

  During those days Krickitt would lose her temper over the smallest of issues. She would forget where she put things around the house. She rarely made it through a whole day without breaking something. She tired easily. Since she couldn’t yet drive, she got bored with staying at home all the time. When she was talking to me or other people, she would laugh when she meant to cry, and she often interrupted others in mid-sentence to blurt out a long story on a completely unrelated subject.

  It was as if I was living with two women inside one body. One was kind and gentle and doing all she could to rebuild our married life. The other was a sullen teenager with a quick temper who didn’t care that her words would hurt me.

  I knew Krickitt had to still be in physical pain because I was, and she had been injured a lot worse than I had. My back was still giving me trouble, but the physical problems weren’t the real problem. I had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. That, the doctors said, was one of the main reasons I was always tense and unable to sleep. I was prescribed antidepressants, painkillers, and heavy-duty sleeping pills just to make it from one day to the next.

  As if life at home wasn’t tough enough, we were also inundated with bills, calls from collection agencies, and conversations with our lawyer. From the time the bill collectors had started calling just weeks after the accident, various health-care providers and their collection agencies had kept up a steady stream of phone calls and letters. It turned out that the other driver had no auto owner’s insurance, so all the expenses fell to our own insurance company. And they were still not cooperating.

  The walls were closing in. I felt powerless to do anything to regain control of my life. It was just too much for me. But it wasn’t too much for God. As he
had so many times over the previous few months, he came to my rescue.

  I wasn’t surprised that God showed me what to do, but I was surprised about the messenger he chose for the job: my immediate boss at Highlands, Athletic Director Rob Evers. Rob was not just a coworker, but also a good friend. He had encouraged me to stay with Krickitt in Phoenix during her inpatient program at Barrow and had kept my job open for me even when I had no idea when or if I would be back. He knew about my emotional and physical struggles during the weeks of commuting between Las Vegas and Phoenix, and he now had a front row seat for my battle to effectively coach my baseball team while dealing with my new life.

  Several months after Krickitt came home, Rob asked me to come into his office. When I sat down, he looked at me with both compassion and an air of authority and told me he thought I needed counseling.

  “Krickitt’s the patient, not me,” I insisted.

  “I’m not worried about Krickitt. She has plenty of doctors and therapists watching her progress. She has had the best therapy possible. Most of all, Kim, she has you to love her and look after her. But who’s looking after you?”

  “I’m going to be all right,” I said. “Things are getting better. Krickitt’s coming along, and I’m fine. Really.”

  Rob was not convinced in the least. “Kim, I’ve watched you with the team. Nobody questions your commitment to the team and your heart for baseball. But you need help. You need counseling, and you need it now. If you say no, I’m putting you on administrative leave.”

  I responded with a few choice words in tremendous anger. I began to grow bitter, but ironically I was getting my own dose of tough love.

  Rob agreed to give me a few days to think things over. Deep down I knew he was right; I just didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to be strong for everyone who was counting on me. My team needed a coach who could focus and lead them to victory. My wife needed a husband she could trust and who would be there for her. I didn’t want to face the fact that I was losing ground on both fronts with every passing minute. On top of it all, the last thing I needed was more medical bills. However, the social worker I was asked to meet with assured me that the school’s health insurance would cover my counseling sessions.

  In the end, I made the painful decision to resign from my position as baseball coach. At that point I wasn’t able to focus on both my job and my wife to the extent they needed, and my commitment to Krickitt was my top priority. After all, I had vowed to be there for her for life, and if it was going to work I knew what had to be done. I hadn’t made that promise to my team, but still I felt I let those boys down even though I knew I had no choice.

  I knew I made the right decision, and I set out to focus on my new job: taking care of Krickitt. Unfortunately, one of my first efforts to spend some quality time with her backfired. The weekend after I resigned from Highlands, the two of us went to a Cowboys baseball game and watched from the bleachers. During the game a bench-clearing fight broke out on the field. The sight of it confused Krickitt and upset her. It didn’t help matters any that the coach of the opposing team told me in no uncertain terms that if I had been on the field doing my job like I should have been, the fight never would have happened. Nevertheless, even though others obviously questioned my decision, I knew it was the right one for me and for Krickitt.

  By the time summer rolled around, Krickitt had recovered enough to start working part-time again as an exercise technician at the same hospital fitness center where she’d worked before the accident. This was a great move, because it gave her the opportunity to be in charge of something again and have something in her life that she felt she had some control over. As she took this step, I could see traces of the old Krickitt. She still had her sense of responsibility—she was always prepared for the job and was always on time. It was so good to see my wife amongst the backdrop of her old life, surrounded by fitness equipment, weight machines, and free weights. I was proud of how far she’d come.

  At the same time Krickitt was becoming more self-sufficient, our relationship was in a death spiral. Just when I thought our home life couldn’t be more erratic and stressful, Krickitt’s flashes of hatred toward me got more brutal than ever.

  One of my most vivid memories of that time was when we were at a car wash, of all places. While we were standing at the exit waiting for the car to appear, we got into an argument. In only a few seconds we were screaming at each other. Soon Krickitt threw her water bottle at me, and the next thing I knew she was striding down the sidewalk away from me. I still couldn’t move very fast, but it only took a couple of minutes for me to catch up with her in a fast-food restaurant, where I again found her crying and talking to her mom on the phone.

  On another particularly bad day we were in the middle of a rather animated disagreement when she picked a fork up off the table behind her, whirled around, and threw it. It stuck in the wall beside me.

  “Leave me alone! I hate you!” If I had heard those words once, I’d heard them a thousand times, but this time it wasn’t Krickitt’s words I was worried about, it was her actions.

  “Krickitt, get a grip!” I typically tried to respond to her anger calmly, but this time I was furious. If she hadn’t taken such bad aim, that fork would have sunk into me instead of the wall.

  “Stop treating me like a child!”

  “Stop acting like one!”

  My wife’s eyes were filled with hatred. “Maybe I should just slit my wrist.”

  That was the last straw. “There’s a knife in the kitchen,” I informed her, pointing in that direction.

  “You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Maybe I’ll hang myself.”

  “There’s a rope in the truck.”

  Krickitt bolted outside and slammed the door shut behind her. In the few seconds it took me to yank it back open she had disappeared. I found her, exhausted and crying, hiding behind a car in an apartment parking lot down the street.

  I helped her back inside and we sat down in the living room. There was a long silence.

  “I miss the old Krickitt,” I said at last.

  “I miss her too,” she answered. I wondered if she even knew who the old Krickitt was.

  What I later came to realize is that Krickitt was just as frustrated as I was, she just didn’t always have the capability to show it in a rational manner. She knew she wasn’t the woman she had once been, and she wanted our marriage to work. I later read in her journal, “Dear Lord, I thank you so much for being by my side and being so faithful to me. I need you now, and daily. I can see that I cannot do this on my own strength, but I need you to carry me and help me through each and every day. I pray for [our] marriage. Please be the center of it and help us to treat one another with respect and a lot of love. . . . Help me to return to the parts of Krickitt you liked. Please help me and forgive me with all my frustrations.”

  It was only a matter of time before well-meaning people started asking me—indirectly but unmistakably—if I would ever consider divorce as an option. “At some point you might just have to let this go,” they would say. A social worker told me that when a married person has a debilitating head injury, the odds of divorce are around 80 to 90 percent. Someone pointed out that taking that route would release me from my responsibility for Krickitt’s medical bills. It would be an easy way out of a lot of problems.

  I had a simple answer for anyone who suggested divorce: “No. It will never happen.” It simply was not an option for either of us. It didn’t matter whether Krickitt remembered me or not, whether it took every penny I had to take care of her, or even whether we ultimately lived together or apart. The simple truth was that I couldn’t see myself going through life without the woman I loved—the woman I had vowed to protect through times of challenge and need.

  But at the same time I knew we couldn’t continue down the path we were on. The more Krickitt recovered physically the worse I felt, because at the same time she was getting well, we were growing more distant emotionally.

 
; For several months I had been battling an idea that I hadn’t wanted to share with anyone. Since Krickitt didn’t remember me, I wondered whether my responsibility was really to re-establish our household as husband and wife the way it once was. After all, that might never happen. Instead, I was believing more and more that my job as a husband who truly, selflessly loved his wife might be to help restore her independence to the point where she could live the rest of her life on her own if that’s what it took to bring her peace.

  7

  SECOND CHANCES

  A year and a half after our wreck, I had finally resigned myself to the fact that my wife would never be the same person she had been before the accident. There were still moments when I would get tantalizing glimpses of the woman I had married that returned me for a split second to the way things had been. But at the same time those glimpses were also heart-piercing reminders of the life I had lost and was never going to get back.

  Krickitt never recovered her memory of our meeting, engagement, marriage, honeymoon, or anything of our life together before the accident. In fact, it turned out that for more than a year she was not even always aware that she had a period of unrecovered memory. She was extremely confused during that time because she didn’t always know who I was or why I was there, yet for most of that time she was living with me as my wife.

  Imagine what that must have been like for her. The movie 50 First Dates was still a decade away from being released, but anyone who has now seen the movie can get a glimpse of what life was like for Krickitt some days. Thankfully, unlike the woman in the movie, Krickitt eventually did get to the point where she always remembered that she couldn’t remember everything about her life.

  During that time, Krickitt was given constant reminders from friends and family that she was indeed married to me, and she watched the video of our wedding and looked at our honeymoon pictures a hundred times. She was slowly realizing that life wasn’t a bad dream she would eventually wake up from. What she was experiencing was the new reality. And as much as she rejected me at times when she couldn’t remember that there were things she couldn’t remember, she always had a sense that I was there as her protector and companion. She knew there was something special about me because I went out of my way to be with her and help her. “I figure if I fell in love with this guy before,” she said, “I could do it again.”