The Woman Who Can't Forget

by Jill Price

  Even then, though, there was one last thing not packed: a strip of wallpaper on which I had been writing notes about my life since 1977. The wallpaper notations started when I was eleven years old—on January 19, 1977, to be exact. That first day, I had just signed my name and the date. As time went on I added more notes, just a little bit about the day, like “100 degrees outside” or “Happy 30th Birthday,” always with the date. Suddenly I became a complete wreck about leaving this piece of wallpaper, with twenty-six years of personal history written on it, behind, and I became determined that I was going to get it off the wall if it was the last thing I did. I had everyone trying to think of ways to get it off the wall, and ultimately I had to scrape it off with a razor. It took ninety minutes of sweat, and many tears, but I did it. It was in pieces, but it was off! Today it is wrapped carefully in a box in my keepsake trunk. The wall did not fare so well, and I hoped the new owners would forgive me.

  By mid-July Jim and I were settled in my parents’ new home, and we were both working. I had a job working on a television special, and he had taken a job as the mechanic for a car dealership where my friend’s husband worked. Best of all, the boys were staying with us.

  Then I had another exciting experience with the scientists. In June 2003, they had asked me if I would be willing to come down to UCI for a presentation of their initial findings to the university’s medical community, known as Grand Rounds, which was scheduled for Wednesday, August 13. The date finally came, and I found myself feeling up and excited. The idea of being presented to a whole room full of doctors was anxiety provoking, but the scientific work was exciting to me, and as I drove to Irvine that day, I was determined to conquer my fears and do whatever they needed.

  Grand Rounds was held in a large lecture hall on the first floor of one of the medical buildings, and I waited in the lobby outside the lecture hall while Dr. McGaugh and Dr. Parker introduced to those in the room the work they had done with me. When Dr. Parker finally came and brought me into the lecture hall, I made myself focus entirely on Dr. McGaugh, who was sitting at a table in the front of the room with a big whiteboard on the wall behind him. He asked me to tell the story of how I had contacted him, why I e-mailed him, and to describe our first meeting. More than fifty doctors were sitting there, dead quiet, staring at me.

  Dr. McGaugh asked me to do my diagrams on the whiteboard, and I drew the time line of history, from 1900 to the present, and also the circles that I see for years. He pointed out that it was of interest to him that the diagram of the way I see the time line would be considered backward for most people, as it is drawn from right to left. He also commented that it was unclear if or in what way these visuals might cause my ability to know the exact day of the week a date falls on.

  After the presentation, the doctors came by to say how fascinating this was. Some of Dr. Parker’s students stuck around and asked me a host of questions about what it’s like to remember everything and what I meant when I said I just “see” the day I’m remembering. I could see that they found my recall abilities hard to fathom. It was at this point that I began to believe that perhaps my memory might actually lead to some kind of contribution, whether in explaining normal memory or perhaps solving some mystery about how to treat memory loss. As Dr. Parker would put it to me some time later, some scientific work has the effect of opening up a window onto new terrain that is rich for study, and that, she said, was what my case would be doing.

  Doing Grand Rounds was like someone showing me a different vision of myself, one of a person with a rare condition that might be able to help people someday, and that was another turning point for me in coping with my memory. My work with the scientists would take another significant break after this, but at least I was assured that they would be continuing their investigations, and I felt confident that they were going to find answers of some kind that would explain to me why my mind worked the way it did.

  Jim had helped me to loosen my emotional grip on my past, and the scientists were now giving me hope that somehow some good might come out of the bizarre phenomenon I’d been living with inside my head. I wasn’t feeling so alone with the swirling of my memories anymore, and I felt that I was now on the path toward breaking free from my fear of the future and my obsession with the past. With Jim, I was finally beginning to live the life I had envisioned for myself when I was a small child.

  Jim and I knew we wanted a family, and we were delighted when I became pregnant in September 2003. A few weeks later, to our great disappointment, I had a miscarriage. That was quite a blow—to learn all at once that I’d finally been starting on the family I’d always wanted, but that it wasn’t going to work out this time. But Jim insisted that we would keep trying, and he promised me that before long, I’d be pregnant again. For Thanksgiving 2003 Jim and I went up to Napa, and I met his parents and the rest of his family. They were a big group, and suddenly, I had two brothers, one sister, and two sisters-in-law, twenty-two nieces and nephews, and one great-niece.

  In the new year, Jim and I enjoyed a wonderful stretch of months, spending lots of time together and beginning to focus on longer-term plans. The boys came again for a month in the summer. My parents and Jim had become very close, and my brother, Michael, had fallen in love with him too. I was finally truly looking forward to my future.

  Then in August 2004, Jim began feeling strange in a way that he found hard to describe; he couldn’t pinpoint what the sensation was like, but he wasn’t feeling right. My mother was concerned that it was his diabetes, and she regularly urged him to get himself checked out, but he was stubborn and he had a psychological block about the diabetes. He didn’t seem to want to believe it was really a problem. On September 1, he was working outside in 108 degree heat and became extremely dehydrated. By the time he got home that night, he was feeling horrible, and the next day he stayed home. On Friday, September 3, 2004, we woke up and he said to me, “I don’t want to scare you, but my whole left side is numb.”

  Terrified, I called 911, and we were at the hospital all day. They took test after test but could not find anything wrong, and without giving him a clear diagnosis, they finally sent him home. He began to feel a little better on Saturday and Sunday of Labor Day weekend, though when my parents had a party that Monday, Jim didn’t come out of our room the entire day. He told me he thought he’d be well enough to go back to work on Tuesday, but that morning, I couldn’t wake him up, and I was so unnerved that I went to get my mom and together we shook him. Finally he opened his eyes, and he stared at me with a look of such fright that it terrified me. I thought he might be in diabetic shock, and this time I couldn’t even wait for an ambulance. We took him to the hospital ourselves. The doctors ran tests on him and he stayed overnight, and the next day he was told that his diabetes was the problem and that he had to start taking it much more seriously.

  The reality that the disease was catching up with him seemed to have hit him very hard, and that Friday, he quit his job and took off for Napa. He hadn’t said a word to me that he was leaving, but I did discover that he’d left me a letter in our mailbox. I went into a kind of emotional shock as I read it; just like that, our marriage was over. For the next three days, I was almost catatonic, holed up at home clutching his letter in disbelief. Even his ex-wife called me to say how shocked she was. Then at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September 14, Jim called. As soon as I heard his voice I started to cry. I told him that if he wanted to stay up in Napa, I would move up there and that I didn’t care about anything but being with him. To my enormous relief, he answered that I didn’t need to do that because he was coming back to LA. He came home a week later. As he sat on our bed with tears rolling down his cheeks trying to explain, I just kissed him on his face and that was that. He was back. It was done. We never spoke of it again. I wish I could say that was the end of the drama in our lives, but fate had more in store for us.

  On my thirty-ninth birthday in late December, Jim and I had dinner with my parents, and while my mother w
as making a toast, I suddenly got a horrible feeling that someone sitting at the table would not be here on my fortieth birthday. That was the beginning of a long period of dread that gripped me, which no matter what I tried over the next several months, I couldn’t shake. I began to make special note of how suddenly some people were confronted with the harsh reality of death. On January 10 a mudslide in La Conchita, just north of LA, killed ten people in their homes. The news reported about one man who had gone out for ice cream right before and had lost his whole family. The suddenness of the tragedy unnerved me, and I started to feel more and more on edge. On January 21, I was out with Jim and our friend Andi, and I finally tried to verbalize how I was feeling, telling them that I felt as if I was hanging from the top of a cliff upside down by my toes. Then on Wednesday, January 26 at 6:03 A.M., a man left his Jeep on the Metro link train tracks, and eleven passengers on the train were killed when it barreled into the car. Jim woke me up to tell me about it, and I remember looking at him and thinking how horrifying it was that people could say good-bye in the morning to their loved ones, thinking they would see them that night and then never see them alive again.

  Jim was working on thinking about more pleasant things. In early January 2005 he saw a job listed in the newspaper for a forklift repairman in the town of Santa Maria, two hours north in central California. He told me he wanted to apply for it and move us up there, and though that was farm country and I’d never relished a rural life I was resolved that if that’s what would make Jim happy, that’s what we’d do. We planned that once we got settled in up there, we’d start our family. He got the job, starting a spell of a long two-hour commute up to work and back every day. Our new life was getting under way, but even though he had focused my attention on our future, I still couldn’t shake the sense of dread I was feeling.

  On March 15 Jim and I were in a Chinese restaurant, and when I opened my fortune cookie, there was no fortune in it. I’m superstitious, and with all of the foreboding I’d been feeling, that was more than a little unsettling to me. He could see the look on my face, so he asked for a couple more, and when I opened another one, again there was no fortune. Jim’s fortune said, Your life will change for

  ever, and though with our plans for moving up to Santa Maria in the works that should probably have been a good omen, it only seemed ominous to me. I started to become convinced that I was going to die.

  Death seemed to be calling out for attention. On March 20, I found out that one of my best friends from junior high school had died of cancer in late February. She would have been forty years old on March 22. This was also the week that Terri Schiavo was taken off life support, and Jim and I had a conversation about what we’d want the other to do if we were in her situation. He told me he’d want me to pull the plug, but I told him not so for me; he’d have to carry my dead body around with him, because I was never going to leave him.

  Wednesday, March 23, Jim and I had a wonderful dinner with my parents. I had received some questions by e-mail from Dr. Parker that day for a paper the scientists were working on about my case. The questions were actually for my mom, and so after dinner, we all sat around and answered them. I was heartened that they were moving forward with a paper about my case, and I couldn’t wait to read more fully about their findings. That was a wonderful, warm family night, and as it turned out, it was the last such night we would ever share with Jim.

  The next night as I got on the computer to e-mail my mom’s responses to Dr. Parker, Jim told me he wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed early. As I wrote my e-mail to Dr. Parker, I thought to myself that maybe I should get off the computer and spend some time with Jim. A little while later, though, he came in to give me a kiss goodnight.

  The next morning, March 25, Good Friday, we were up and out of bed by 4:00 A.M. as usual. I made his lunch while he got ready for work, and then we sat and talked while he ate his breakfast. At 5:00 A.M. I hugged and kissed him good-bye, and I listened as he drove away into the darkness. I will always be haunted by the vision of Jim walking out the door that morning into the darkness, and as poignant as that memory is, and as hard as it is for me to go back and back to, the vividness with which I will retain that memory for the rest of my life is also a great gift. Because he had a two-hour drive to work, he always called me along the way. That morning he called at 6:00 and again at 7:30, and the last thing he ever heard me say to him was that I loved him.

  At 9:38, I was on the computer, responding to a message from Dr. Parker acknowledging mine of the night before. The subject line of her message was “the future,” and she had asked me whether I knew days of the week for dates in the future in the same way I knew them for dates in the past. Could I, for example, say what day of the week September 25,2005, would be, or January 8,2007? I answered that I could see the days of the week through the end of 2005, but after that, the future was blank. I added, though, that in regard to the future, I had been thinking a good deal about it lately, because I was about to turn forty and I “would like to step into the next part of my life with a clean slate.” Those e-mails back and forth seem eerie to me now, given what happened the very next moment.

  At 9:40, just as I sent my e-mail, my cell phone rang. It was my mother telling me that she wanted to talk to my father. Why hadn’t she called him then? I wondered. She hadn’t wanted me to get the news over the phone. Her number at work was Jim’s second emergency contact number, and his boss had called her because he couldn’t reach me at home. Our Internet connection went through our landline, so the phone line had been busy. After talking to my mother, my dad came in and told me that Jim had collapsed at work and had been rushed to the hospital. At first I couldn’t even understand what my father was saying. When I called the hospital moments later, they told me that he was unconscious, and my mind went into shock. The rest of that conversation is a blank in my mind; the next thing I remember is hearing the theme music to The

  Price Is Right on TV after I’d hung up the phone.

  My mother came and picked me up, and we drove the two hours north. I spoke to the emergency room nurse three times during the trip, but there was no change. When we arrived, we were rushed into the emergency room to see him. My forty-two-year-old husband was lying in a coma on life support. A vision that will haunt me for the rest of my life is that when we walked into his room, his eyes were open, looking dead, like a doll’s eyes. So began six days of hell.

  Jim was moved to the critical care unit, and I stayed by his side all day and most of the night for all those days. My mom stayed in a motel with me, and my brother and my dad drove up regularly. Jim’s mom came, along with his sister and brothers. Our family friend Beverly arrived, and my friend Wendy came to give support. We sat vigil, we comforted one another, and we prayed.

  The doctors ran a battery of tests to try to determine what had happened to Jim, and on Saturday morning they informed us that he had suffered a massive stroke;a blood clot had exploded in his brain stem, almost surely the result of his diabetes. The nurses told me that he might be able to hear me, so I bought a bundle of magazines and read to him. In People there was a review of the movie GuessWho, a remake of GuessWho’s Coming to Dinner, which I loved, and I suddenly found myself singing the theme song of that movie, “The Glory of Love.” Up to that point Jim had not made a single movement in all the time I had sat with him, but as I started in on the song for a third time, suddenly his body jerked violently from side to side. I was sure that he was trying to tell me to stop singing, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I clung desperately to that sign that he had heard me—that he was still alive in there and would make it through this.

  On Monday, the third day that Jim had been in a coma, his doctor came in and started talking to me about organ donation. I was stunned. I was still praying desperately that he would miraculously snap back to life as people in comas sometimes do, and I wasn’t ready for that discussion yet. Then, at 3:00 P.M. on Wednesday, the doctors attending Jim called a family
meeting and informed us that the results of a CAT scan had shown that he had almost no brain activity. They were going to be declaring him dead at 5:30. I felt as if my insides were being ripped out of me, and I put my head down on the table and let out a horrifying sound that sends a shock through me every time I relive those moments again in my mind.

  I’ve heard that in times like that, confronted with such devastating news, a person often goes into automatic, operating on some sort of emergency backup system in the mind, and I believe that’s what happened to me. Jim’s mother and I talked with the doctors about the organ donation procedure at 5:00 P.M. that day, and then I signed the consent papers. It wouldn’t be until the next day that they harvested the organs. I had decided that there was one part of Jim that I was determined to keep. We had planned to start a family, and now those dreams of doing so together were shattered, but I asked the doctors if they would harvest his sperm, in the hope that I would someday be able to have his baby. At first, they refused, and I couldn’t get them to budge, but then my dad went to the hospital administrators and told them a moving story.