Counting the Days While My Mind Slips Away

by Ben Utecht

  By home, she meant Minneapolis. We’d always talked about moving back close to our families, but up until this point the two of us had moved around chasing my career. “But what about my music?” I said.

  “You don’t have to be here to be successful. I talked to Jeremy and Adie about it. A lot of successful artists do not live in Nashville. Sandi doesn’t,” Karyn said.

  I thought about the upcoming tour and what was going to be best for the family while I was away. I also thought about where I wanted our daughters to grow up. Both Karyn and I had always wanted our children to have a close relationship with their grandparents. That’s hard to do when you live more than nine hundred miles away. “Okay. I think you’re right,” I said.

  That summer, the summer of 2011, Karyn and I packed up all our things once again and bought a home just outside the Twin Cities. The move came in the midst of my recording my album and preparing for the upcoming tour. Looking back, that summer, like much of our time in Nashville, is a blur. I think that’s why I didn’t panic when I had trouble learning all the songs I was to sing on tour. We had so much going on that I couldn’t really concentrate and focus. At least that’s what I told myself. Everything would be better once we got in the new house and got settled.

  •  •  •

  Not long after we moved back to Minnesota, Karyn, the girls, and I went to see our good friends Matt and Kim Anderle. Matt and I were teammates and roommates at Minnesota. We hadn’t been able to spend much time with Matt and Kim since we graduated, but they’re the kind of friends where you can go ten years without seeing them and when you get back together it’s like you have never been apart. We had so much fun that evening. All of us sat in Matt and Kim’s kitchen, sharing stories and laughing.

  The night, however, turned when during our conversation Matt said something about their wedding. “Oh my gosh, I want to hear all about it,” Karyn said. Matt started telling stories, with Kim giving commentary. With each one Karyn laughed and smiled. The conversation kept going, with Matt and Kim going back and forth, adding little details to which the other replied, “Oh that was great,” or “I almost forgot that!”

  I sat there in shock. With each story I kept wondering why I had not been a part of it. Matt and I have been close for years, and yet he didn’t think enough of me to invite me to his own wedding? I invited him to my wedding. How could he not return the favor? I know my schedule can get a little crazy, but Matt and I are close. I don’t care what I had going on, I would have certainly made time to be there.

  As I listened to the conversation I went from being annoyed to downright angry. Finally I’d had enough. I stopped Matt in the middle of one of his stories and asked, “Why didn’t you invite me?”

  He looked at me awkwardly, paused for a moment to acknowledge my sarcasm, then went back to telling his story.

  “No, Matt, I mean it,” I interrupted again. “I don’t care what I had going on, I would have found a way to be there. How could you not have invited me to your wedding after all we’ve been through together?”

  Matt, Kim, and Karyn stopped talking and stared at me as if they were waiting for me to bust out laughing. I didn’t feel like laughing. This was no joke. “When was it? Surely I wasn’t busy,” I said.

  No one said a word. After more awkward silence Kim got up, walked over to a table, and picked up their wedding album. “You’re right there, Ben,” she said, pointing to a photo of Matt and his groomsmen. She was right. There I was, right in the middle of them all, wearing a matching tux. “And there . . . and there . . . and there,” she said, turning page after page.

  “You weren’t just a groomsman,” Matt said. “You sang for us. Don’t you remember?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I scoured the farthest reaches of my mind and nothing came up. I had absolutely no memory of the day. None. Seeing the photos didn’t nudge faint recollections of the wedding. I didn’t have an “Oh, yeah, now I remember” moment. I felt like an excavator had come in, dug up every trace of the memory, filled in the hole, and planted grass on top to make it appear as though it had never been there. For me, it never had. The face in the photos looked like me, but it might as well have been someone else, someone long gone.

  This little episode pretty much put an end to our fun that night. Matt and Kim and even Karyn looked at me a little differently, like I was somehow now fragile and broken. They hesitated to share any stories not only about their wedding but also about any of the good times we had had together. No one wanted a repeat of what had just happened. Neither did I.

  The ride home was more than a little awkward. This was the first time that the realization hit both Karyn and me that something was wrong with me. Up until this moment I did not share a lot of what was going on with my memory problems with her. I didn’t want to burden her with it. Now we both had no choice. I wasn’t just a little bit forgetful. My brain had changed. Memories had been erased and weren’t coming back. I was frightened. I wondered how many more might be gone.

  A couple of weeks later I had another episode. I had a business breakfast meeting planned, which I was going to host. On the day of the event I got the girls up and rushed them around getting ready. Karyn and I ran around getting all the food ready, cleaning the house, and everything else you have to do to get a home with three very young children ready to host guests. I thought the meeting was going to start at nine. We had the girls dressed in their Sunday best, ready to make a good impression.

  Nine o’clock came and went, and no one pulled into the driveway. Nine fifteen passed. Nine thirty came and went. Karyn finally said to me, “Double-check your email. Maybe we have the wrong time written down.”

  I pulled up my email. At the top of the list was one from the day before. It read, “Writing to confirm our conversation from earlier today that we are cancelling tomorrow’s meeting.” I’d read the email. I’d had the conversation. But I had no memory of either. Like Matt’s wedding, every memory of what I imagine was a long conversation had completely disappeared. I could not ignore this any longer.

  •  •  •

  In late fall I had to leave home for six weeks for the Jim Brickman tour. We dove headlong into rehearsals, but I quickly noticed another problem. I could not remember the song lyrics. I’d worked on learning them all summer long, and some of the songs were old, familiar Christmas songs I’d sung my whole life. Yet in the middle of a verse I found words suddenly escaped me. You might be able to fake it by mouthing “Watermelon, watermelon” when you are in a large choir, but that wasn’t going to work onstage, alone or in a duet, in front of thousands of people.

  I doubled my efforts to learn the song lyrics, but gaps kept showing up. Jim and Anne were both gracious with me, but I could tell it was concerning at times. Finally, I wrote out large-print copies of some of the lyrics and taped them to the stage floor. I did this in rehearsals and for many of the shows I performed on the tour. It was the only way I could get through them.

  In spite of my frustrations with the song lyrics, I loved being on tour. We hit a city a few hours before the show, ran through a quick rehearsal, then geared up for the night’s performance. Every night before I went out onstage I went through a set of “pregame” warm-ups. Believe it or not, I did many of the same warm-ups I did before a football game. I jumped up and down and kicked my legs in the air. I may have even let out a primordial grunt or two. To me, the adrenaline rush and excitement felt the same. I went out onstage ready to compete. If a linebacker had cut in front of the drums, I would have plowed right into him. Concert night felt like game day. I felt I could have hit somebody with a football move.

  As soon as the show was over we all piled on the bus and hung out for a bit before heading to the next city. Everyone slept on the bus as we traveled through the night from Syracuse, New York, to Burlington, Vermont, or from Burlington down to Washington, D.C. Tour buses have small, built-in sleeping quarters, which are basically three-sided coffins in the sides of the bus.
From end to end the bunk is six feet, six inches long. Cramming my six-foot-seven frame into that space wasn’t easy, but I never minded. I slept like a baby on the bus. All my life I had dreamed of becoming a professional musician. Now I was living my dream.

  As part of the promotion of the tour, I hired my own public relations firm to set up press opportunities in each city ahead of us. They passed out press releases to the local media and tried to create a buzz for the show and for the artists performing. Keep in mind that at this point I was looking at making this a career. The holiday tour was, I hoped, just the first step into this life full-time. In D.C. the PR firm connected me with a reporter from USA Today, Erik Brady. The story of the singing Super Bowl champion intrigued Erik, which brought him out to interview me. However, the story soon stopped being merely about the singing Super Bowl champion. I opened up to Erik about my concussion story and my battles with memory loss. It resonated with him. He also interviewed Jim and Anne and others connected with the tour as part of writing the story. On December 21, 2011, Erik’s feature article about me appeared on the front page of the USA Today sports section. I had now gone public in a really big way with my story. I did not yet know it, but the USA Today feature would prove to be the launch of something much bigger than I ever imagined possible.

  The tour continued through the holidays. I loved it. I invited Karyn and the girls to come join me for a few days toward the end of the tour. Having them there was, to put it mildly, a disaster. Tour buses and jumping from city to city don’t really work with twin one-year-olds and a not-yet three-year-old. Karyn was miserable, which made me miserable. I had hoped they could come and share the joy of this new stage in my career. Instead, Karyn and I had one of the worst fights of our marriage. “I can’t believe you would choose this over us,” she said to me.

  “I’m not. I’m doing this for us.”

  “Are you sure, Ben? Are you sure?”

  There was more said than just that, but that gives you an idea of the point of it. Singing for a living may have been the life I had dreamed of since I was a teenage boy singing in the high school choir, but this wasn’t the life my wife imagined when we started a family of our own. Clearly, something was going to have to give.

  CHAPTER 22

  SURRENDER

  I WOKE UP LATE ONE morning. The sound of little girls laughing and squealing echoed up from downstairs. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. The Brickman tour had ended a few months earlier, after which I came home to Minnesota. Karyn, the girls, and I settled into our dream home. Both sets of grandparents lived fairly close by, which meant the girls got to see them whenever they wanted. That’s what Karyn and I had always wanted. This house was what we had always wanted as well. I should have been up and happy.

  Instead I couldn’t get out of bed.

  I thought the Brickman tour might open new doors, and I almost landed a contract with a label soon after, but the deal fell through. A career in music now felt a long ways away—around nine hundred miles away. Rightly or wrongly, I felt like when I left Nashville I left my dream behind. When we lived there I kept myself busy working on my EP, then trying to sell it to every label in town. About the time I gave up on the EP, Jim Brickman had entered the picture. I spent my last few months in Tennessee in the studio, working on my album Christmas Hope, which was followed by breakneck preparation for the tour.

  But all that was over now. I was label-less.

  Jobless.

  Worthless.

  I rolled over and stared out the window. What’s the point? I asked myself. What’s the point of getting out of bed, of doing anything beyond lying here hoping it all goes away? I heard my now three-year-old yelling something at her little sisters. Sounds of “Mooooommmm” filled the air below. I just lay where I was. Karyn probably needed some reinforcements. I should have been the cavalry riding down the stairs to the rescue. Instead I stared out the window.

  Part of me screamed, “Get up!” I’d never been this guy before. I’d never battled emptiness and hopelessness. Now they defined me. Maybe what I felt was the normal letdown from the end of the tour. Thirty-two shows in thirty cities with only one day off through it all. That much adrenaline can be addictive. Yeah, maybe that’s why I couldn’t force myself out of bed.

  Or maybe it was the disappointment of not landing the deal with the new label. The negotiations had gone very well. I thought for sure we were going to sign. My dream felt right there, only to fall away. Anyone would be depressed after seeing their dream escape their grasp. Yeah, maybe that’s why I spent so much time in bed in a fog.

  Or maybe it was the fact that nearly two and a half years had passed since I filed my grievance against the Bengals and I was still no closer to getting the nearly $1 million the team owed me. After the hearing, which was a year ago, Tim English told me they still had to take depositions of other witnesses before the arbitrator could make his decision. All of the depositions were completed by late fall 2010. Tim filed our brief with the arbitrator in late February 2011. The brief summarized all the evidence in my case in my favor as well as offered counterarguments to the evidence presented by the team and the NFL. In the letter that accompanied the copy Tim sent me, he told me to expect a decision in three to six months. More than a year had passed and still no ruling had been given. About three months after I received the brief I started calling Tim to ask if he’d heard anything. The calls continued on a weekly basis. Twice we were told the arbitrator had suffered different medical emergencies, which was the official explanation for the delay. Nothing could explain why it was now taking so long. I started to think that I was never going to see a dime of that money I had counted on for my family’s future. Football had taken my memories and now it was going to take away my family’s financial security. Yeah, that’s why I was depressed. Who could blame me?

  Or maybe the reason I didn’t get out of bed was that I didn’t want to. I had no energy, no purpose, no sense of anything mattering much right at that moment. I just wanted to lie there and hope the world disappeared.

  Karyn came upstairs and stuck her head in the door, very quietly. “Are you awake?” she said in a near whisper.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Are you going to come downstairs soon? The girls want you.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.” I kept staring out the window. My daughters’ voices echoed into the room. I tried to muster up the energy to move. Eventually I did, but not before I lay in my bed for another hour, maybe longer, just staring out the window, trying to pull myself together.

  I had never struggled with depression in my life other than a brief period in October and November 2009. Back then doctors told me concussions might be connected to depression and changes in behavior. After we settled into life back in Minnesota I found myself struggling again. I couldn’t help but wonder, Is this going to be the new normal? Did the concussions also do this to me?

  I knew other former NFL players battled debilitating depression along with memory loss and mood and personality changes, all caused by concussive and nonconcussive blows to the head. Not long after my grievance hearing in July 2010 I started researching the effects of concussions on other players. I googled CTE, the brain disease Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered in former players who died young, many by suicide. I watched former Pittsburgh Steelers legend Mike Webster’s rambling, nearly incoherent interviews on YouTube. His story ended with him dying at the age of fifty after living in his pickup truck because of the mental haze in which he lived. I also read stories of Andre Waters, Terry Long, and Justin Strzelczyk, former players whose stories were later a key part of the movie Concussion. They all died young and tragically after suffering with memory problems and alarming behavior changes. One died in a fiery car crash when he drove his truck the wrong way down an interstate highway and collided with a tanker truck. Another took his own life by shooting himself in the chest. He did not shoot himself in the head, so that his brain could be tested for CTE. Another died by downing
a gallon of antifreeze. As I read their stories, all I could think was, Is that going to be me? Am I doomed to the same fate as all these other players?

  •  •  •

  On one of these dark days I managed to force myself downstairs and started engaging with my daughters. I felt better. The fog cleared somewhat. I felt more like the old Ben. At the time we were trying to potty-train Elleora, which, as any parent will tell you, can be a frustrating experience for both parent and child. Elleora was nearly four and a little behind schedule because she had some digestive issues that made going number two painful. Karyn asked me to take Elleora to the bathroom and see if she would do anything. “Sure,” I said. Reaching down, I took my daughter by the hand, “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go potty.” Yes, we parents are reduced to saying words like potty.

  I put Elleora on the toilet while I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. After a couple of seconds she announced, “I’m done.”

  “Did you do anything?” I asked.

  “I don’t need to go potty,” she said.

  “You need to try. Sit there until you do,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she said with a frown.

  “Yeah, you can, honey. You need to try a little longer.”

  “I don’t need to go. I can’t go.” Elleora’s voice was almost a cry by this point.

  “I don’t care,” I said, anger rising in my voice. I stood up, stretching my entire six-seven frame above her. “You are going to sit here until you go. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?!”

  Elleora started to cry but I wasn’t moved. Anger took over. It’s hard to remember but I think for the next forty-five minutes I stood there, towering over her, waiting for her to do what she was supposed to do.