My Life, Deleted

by Scott Bolzan

  When the boys emerged they were beaming with pride, which made me feel excited right along with them.

  “Awesome!” I said. “You guys look great!”

  The event started in a room of parents and their three hundred children, who were loaded up with pizza and party food, including designer cupcakes as well as the homemade kind with smeared frosting. Considering these families had recently been homeless and were now trying to get their lives back on track, I figured this was probably the first time all year that they’d been indulged with goodies like this.

  For those few hours we had a blast. In that hotel all their troubles—and mine too—were forgotten, receding into the laughter and the bubbly silliness of children having fun. It made me feel like a kid too, so this was an effective way for me to experience what it had been like for me and my kids, growing up. When Joan noted that these children seemed to prefer the homemade cupcakes over the fancy ones, I wondered if, like me, they stuck with what they knew because, with all the turmoil in their lives, they needed the comfort of the familiar.

  One surprising thing I learned was that homeless people weren’t just the drug addicts or the older men with straggly beards I’d seen on TV, a group I feared that Grant might soon join. I was surprised and saddened to see so many mothers with children in this group, a segment of society I’d never pictured having to live in a car or under bridges until the organizers told me otherwise.

  As we took the kids on a trick-or-treat tour of the first floor, where every room had been decorated by hotel employees, I was impressed by the kids’ creative ploys to get candy.

  “Show us a trick,” a staff member told a little girl in a princess costume, who danced and pranced around to earn her treat.

  Aden refused to go into any of the rooms with haunted-house themes because he was too scared.

  “Don’t you want to go inside and see?” I asked. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Uh-uh,” he said, stiffening his arm against the door frame to keep anyone from pushing him inside.

  “It’s just people with costumes,” Joan said reassuringly, but he still wouldn’t budge, happy to let the staff bring him candy from inside. The fearless Noah needed no encouraging, however, plowing right in and exploring.

  Melia Patria, the Nightline producer, followed me as I vicariously experienced the kids and their glee. She’d been trailing me with a camera for several days, from 9:00 A.M. until 9:00 P.M., sometimes as late as 11:00 P.M., asking me for one more story before we turned in.

  “Tell me about that,” she’d say.

  During the four days Melia was with us, we pulled out the wedding footage that my sister Bonnie had found in her garage and let Melia capture my reaction as I watched it for the first time with Joan on the couch. It was grainy, only a couple of minutes long, and had no sound. It showed us walking out of the church and getting into the limo as people threw rice on us. I’d wanted to know how I’d felt that day, and the video answered that question: grinning ear to ear, I looked like the happiest guy on the planet. I only wished there was more footage to watch.

  When Melia was done filming, she told us she would return soon with Bob Woodruff, the ABC reporter who had suffered a severe brain injury when hit by an IED in Iraq. This was quite an honor for me and Joan, because we’d seen him on television and read his book. We were pleased that he wanted to cover our story, assuming that he would be more compassionate after suffering a brain injury himself.

  Even though no one but Joan wanted Grant to join us for Thanksgiving dinner, he came over and acted his usual passive-aggressive self. We captured the event with the TV camera that Melia had left with us to film any firsts for me, such as handing out candy on Halloween or stuffing the turkey.

  Earlier that week Joan had asked me to do her a favor on the day after the holiday, which she explained was known as Black Friday.

  “Honey, would you go to the store for me on Friday?” she asked. “It’s a big sale day. This is a little different from what you usually do, but you’d really help me out because I can’t be two places at once.”

  “Whatever you want me to do, I will,” I said.

  Joan wanted me to buy Taylor a sewing machine for college. I’d have to get up early to be there by 5:30 A.M., when the store opened, which I said was no problem.

  While Joan and Taylor were still at the mall taking advantage of the clothing sales from midnight to 5:00 A.M., I left the house for Joann Fabrics. Aiming to arrive early and be at the front of the line, I was shocked to see two hundred crazed women already queued up, coupons in hand, discussing what they were going to buy. I was damn near afraid for my life; it seemed like these women would plow me over to get what they wanted.

  “Why are you here?” asked one of less threatening ones.

  When I told her about the errand my wife had sent me on, she laughed. “What a good husband, coming here and fighting this chaos,” she said. “I think your wife pulled a fast one on you, because you have no idea what you are about to see.”

  The line started moving as soon as the front doors opened, and I felt like I was in a pack of hyenas chasing a rabbit. Once we got inside, pointy elbows were flying as the women competed for pieces of fabrics and silly Christmas decorations. I ran the other way as fast as I could, looking for an employee to direct me.

  “Where are the sewing machines?” I asked.

  “Follow me, sir,” she said.

  Doing as instructed, I found the Brother electronic sewing machine, with all the bells and whistles, that Joan had circled in the advertisement. I grabbed the box and headed for the register with a coupon in my pocket for an additional 10 percent off. I didn’t get very far, though, because a masculine-looking drill sergeant wannabe, whose jeans were too tight for her oversized frame, stopped me in my tracks. “You can’t leave this area,” she said. “You have to pay for that here.”

  “Okay,” I said sheepishly.

  As she rang me up, I handed her the coupon. “You can’t use that with a sewing machine purchase,” she scolded, clearly frustrated with me.

  “My wife said I had to use it, and I better use it,” I replied.

  “I’m sorry, but tell your wife it’s not good on electric machines. It says so right on the coupon.”

  With that, I paid and got the hell out of there, happy to have escaped alive. As soon as I got outside I called Joan, hoping against hope that the news helicopter hovering above me wouldn’t catch my humiliated face on video as I stood outside a fabric store with a sewing machine under my arm. Joan answered on speaker phone, and I could hear her laughing.

  “How was Joann Fabrics?” she asked. “Did you get it? Did you have fun?”

  By then I was able to find the humor in the situation. “I think you took advantage of me by feeding me to the wolves,” I said.

  She laughed again, as if she’d known exactly what she’d set me up for.

  I wasn’t sure if Joan pulled a fast one on me, but in the future I would be more savvy and honor her Black Friday shopping requests only if they were for manly places, such as electronic stores, where Joan said I used to go.

  Gearing up to meet Bob Woodruff was nerve-racking, but the anxiety soon faded once we started sharing stories about our brain injuries and memory losses, as if we were comparing battle wounds. Even though his were from an actual war, I felt like my body and my mind had been waging their own battle.

  Bob explained that his pain had been much more physical than emotional, but he too had suffered headaches for a long time and lost part of his sight. Joan and I had read about his pain, how he’d dealt with his new disabilities, and the difficulties he’d faced returning to the career he’d always loved. Although I couldn’t remember running an aviation company and didn’t know if I would ever have a desire to do so again, I hoped that he would give me some insight into how he’d managed to persevere.

  As we talked it soon became apparent that, like me, the love of his family was what had gotten him through the nightmari
sh recovery we’d both experienced. I noted that, also like me, Bob had tried to keep a positive attitude and to work through the pain to reach his goals.

  While the crew was setting up to shoot some footage of us walking toward the fountain in the backyard, Bob and I shared a few private moments, talking man to man. He said he had retained his wealth of knowledge, but he sometimes had trouble remembering the right words to say. I’d lost all my knowledge, I told him, and had a similar word retrieval problem.

  “I don’t know if I ever would have made a full recovery if I didn’t have my memories to fall back on,” he said. “That’s what really helped me to focus on getting back to who I was. I wouldn’t want to trade places with you for anything.”

  His last words paralyzed me as I felt the shock of their impact creep through my skin.

  How bad off am I, really, that this guy, who had a big part of his head blown off by a roadside bomb and has gone through so much physical pain, wouldn’t want to be me?

  I knew he didn’t mean to be negative or hurtful. I was sure he only wanted me to understand how far he’d come in his own recovery. As wounded as I felt, I tried to put his comment aside and focus on his drive and determination, which were truly inspirational to me. I too was on a quest to make it back and be successful once again in whatever I chose to do. If I spent too much more time thinking about it, Bob’s words would have set me back months in my recovery. But at the time, it felt like they already had.

  It had been five months since we’d celebrated my forty-seventh birthday, but Joan and Taylor thought it would be amusing to get me another birthday cake to commemorate the first anniversary of my accident on December 17. I guess I couldn’t blame them. Whenever I didn’t know something or made a mistake, I’d throw out my “get out of jail free” motto: “Give me a break; I’m not even one year old yet.”

  That night after dinner they turned out the lights and brought out a chocolate cake, topped with a flaming #1 candle and Happy 1st Birthday spelled out in red icing. I had to laugh at the gesture.

  “You guys are funny,” I conceded.

  They sang “Happy Birthday” to me, and even though I was now an old pro at it, I wasn’t about to sing it to myself.

  “Does it seem like a year?” I asked.

  “When you don’t know something or when it’s something we all know you knew, it feels like it just happened,” Taylor said. “But other days, when nothing comes up, it seems like a long time ago.”

  We debated the differences between the old and new Scott, my fresh feelings of shock about society, including how people treated others with such hostility and anger and how much and how fast some people ate.

  I’d had similar conversations with Mark, who told me I was much more mellow but much less self-confident and assertive since the accident. Before, he said, “you never took no for an answer. No matter what, you’d find a way to accomplish it. That’s gone.”

  I didn’t know if I’d really felt that way before, but I certainly didn’t feel I possessed those personality traits now. What I did know was that the more knowledge I gained, the more confident I felt. Meanwhile, there were a whole lot of things I still didn’t know and struggled to understand, including concepts the old Scott once comprehended.

  Joan said I wasn’t a “creative thinker” anymore. Before, I was more jaded and bitter from the hard knocks the business world had thrown at me, but I was good at coming up with innovative marketing ideas, such as changing our marketing focus to the jet debit card—what Joan called “thinking out of the box.”

  Today, I felt like I lived in a box, and yet it felt comfortable in there. Following a routine and doing the same things over and over helped me cope with daily life, with its constant bombardment of new information and countless choices. For example, I’d liked eating buffalo wings before, but I ate them frequently now because they were a comfort to me—something safe I knew I liked.

  Today, I also needed people to show or prove things to me in concrete terms before I could understand or believe them. Intangibles and abstract concepts that I couldn’t see, touch, or smell made me agitated because I couldn’t get my head around them.

  Take my brain injury and the SPECT scan, for instance. Once I saw the images of my brain scan on paper, I began to understand the concept of reduced blood flow to those areas. But that understanding was crystallized when I saw Dr. Korn explaining the test to Bob Woodruff on Nightline—and showing him the corresponding orange and blue parts of my brain as compared to a normal brain on the computer screen. Without seeing those test results, I would probably still be wondering.

  They say that addicts and alcoholics are black-and-white thinkers too, so that gave me something else in common with Grant. “I can surrender to the idea that I’m powerless, but I don’t know if I can surrender to a higher power, and I don’t know what a higher power might be for me,” Grant said to explain his problems with the twelve-step program in AA. Given my problems understanding religion, I could see why he was having such trouble.

  Joan had told me that she was still a believer, after being brought up in a religious Lutheran family, and although her parents still went to church and Bible study every week, she stopped going because she had problems with “organized religion.” Sometimes I took her word for things, and the idea that there is a God was one of them. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t still struggling to understand the concept.

  Who’s taking care of Taryn if there’s no God and no heaven? But if no one can show this person and this place to me, how can I believe in them?

  “Where is he?” I asked Joan.

  “He’s everywhere,” she said.

  “How do you know this?”

  “You just have to believe,” she replied. “You don’t have to see to believe, but if you look at the mountains, the oceans, the human body, how can this be created by anything other than a God?”

  My hope, of course, was that something or someone was in fact taking care of Taryn and that she was someplace peaceful and beautiful, not just buried beneath the headstone I’d seen in our scrapbook. Still, the more questions I asked about religion, the more questions I had.

  When we go to Chicago in the spring, Joan says she will take me to the church she’d attended growing up, where we’d also gotten married. Knowing I’d been brought up Catholic, I told her that I wanted to go to one of those services too. It was all in the name of relearning and rediscovering, and I still had plenty of that to do.

  When people asked me, “What is it like not having memories of your past?” I tried to relate my explanation to a common experience. I usually asked if they’d seen the movie Family Man, starring Nicholas Cage as Jack Campbell and Tea Leoni as his wife, Kate.

  This had been a family favorite before my accident, and although I’d probably watched parts of it fifteen times since, it was still difficult for me to get through because the plot had so many parallels to my situation. I shared many of the frustrations and feelings of loss that plagued Jack, a successful and materialistic Wall Street deal maker who wakes up Christmas Eve in the life he would’ve had if he’d married his college sweetheart. He suddenly has two kids, a dog, a career as a salesman at a suburban tire sales outfit, and an attorney wife who helps the poor, but no memory of how he got there.

  The look of confusion on Jack’s face when he wakes up was uncannily familiar. I’d felt the same way when I arrived home from the hospital, as if I was having a bad dream. We’d both married our college sweethearts, were both successful businessmen, and had both discovered that our lives had completely changed, but we didn’t know why or how or who we were.

  It was hard to watch the fear in Jack’s eyes when he realizes his new life is not going to change because that was also true in my life, and I was reminded of it every day.

  People have told Joan and me that our story is like a movie. That may be true, but for us it’s our reality, and every day brings us a new obstacle to overcome. Still, like the new Jack Campbell, I am and
always will be a family man. And like Jack’s family, ours always tries to joke and laugh during the toughest times because sometimes it’s the only way that I can deal with things and stay positive. Apparently this is one thing that has changed for the better since my accident. Before, I’d get pissed when I made mistakes, unable to laugh at myself. Now, I found the innocence of my mistakes comical, and if I didn’t laugh, I’d probably just cry.

  I had to admit that, as my reeducation continued, some lessons were still more entertaining to others than they were to me. Like the afternoon that Joan asked me to cut an onion but forgot to warn me about the ramifications. There I was, slicing away, when my eyes started burning like hell and tears came pouring out.

  “What is this?” I asked, startled and confused.

  Joan said this was a normal reaction, then chuckled at my culinary misfortune.

  “What kind of seeing-eye dog are you?” I quipped.

  My second year of yuletide cheer went much more smoothly. With Taylor’s help, I bought Joan some Victoria Secret mango lotion and a massage gift certificate, and she got me a book titled 100 Days in Photographs: Pivotal Events That Changed the World, along with some other thoughtful yet inexpensive gifts.

  Seeing that my brain had been healing and I’d taken so much pain medication during the previous Christmas, I didn’t remember much about the ornaments or where they went on the tree, so as we hung them I asked Joan and Taylor to tell me the stories again. At first I was concerned about why I’d forgotten something so important after my accident, but I soon got over it. It was good to hear the stories once more—including the ones about the precious Taryn angels—without the trauma of having to learn about her death all over again.

  Joan put on some silly Christmas music, and I had to tease her as she and Taylor sang along. “You can remember the words to these, but you can’t remember where you put your car keys?” I joked.