Thursday, February 6, 2014

"The accident that killed me"

"This story starts on May 22, 1988. It is important to appreciate that what happened on that day was quite literally life changing for many people. Not just me. As I write about what transpired, I will rely chiefly on the memories of my husband, Jim, the only living soul who was present on that day and can recount what happened. Or at least how he remembers it happening. I was there, too, of course, but my memories are lost. My two sons were there, but they were too young to remember what took place that day."
Here, then, is what would have happened on a typical Sunday for me in the spring of 1988. I can’t stress enough that this is not a factual account of what transpired that day, but merely an educated guess...

It’s the next moment when Jim’s memories come into sharp focus. He distinctly remembers seeing Patrick out of the corner of his eye, crawling from the family room into the kitchen...

Nobody knows what exactly happened next. Jim’s back was turned. “I hear this noise,” Jim recalls. “I have only an auditory memory of what it sounded like. I remember being startled. I turn, and this is the picture: It’s something out of the movie Carrie, where I’m standing, I’m turning, you’re holding out Patrick, and as you’re handing him to me, you’re collapsing, blood flowing from your head down your front.” As I crumpled to the floor, Jim says he watched the light in my eyes go out...

“I’m trying to figure out what to do next,” he recalls, “because what I’m seeing makes no sense.”

My body lay on the floor in a heap, inert.

With Patrick in one arm and the phone in the other, he dialed 911.
“Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” “I’m in my house. My wife has collapsed.” “All right, sir. Is she breathing?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, sir. We’ll get someone there as soon as we can.”
Excerpted from "I Forgot to Remember"

9 comments:

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

(1) On Gilligan's Island, you'd get conked on the head and get amnesia. Another conk on the head and you'd be back to normal, exactly the same as it is in real life.

(2) It's difficult to contemplate the here-and-now implications of amnesia and then reconcile it all with modern conceptions of a Christian afterlife.

(3) The movie Momento (2000) could have been absolutely superb if only you could have somehow performed on it a kind of surgical Hollywoodectomy.

ricpic said...

I'm glad Eric cleared it up that a second conk brings back memory. Frankly I was getting a little nervous.

ricpic said...

Is amnesia all that bad? Think of all the cringeworthy memories that are erased.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I think you meant Memento (2000).

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Right you are, Lem.

Menstro was the giant whale in Pinocchio (1940).

Silly me.

Icepick said...

I think you mean Monstro.

Menstro is the villain in The Vagina Monologues, I think.

Paddy O said...

"all with modern conceptions of a Christian afterlife."

The key with dealing with modern conceptions of a Christian afterlife is understanding that no one really knows what a Christian afterlife is going to be like. No marriage, that's one thing Christians can say.

Mostly, the idea is that the afterlife is a person made whole, who they were always intended to be, with the contradictions and damage of life resolved into a new wholeness.

That's probably a big reason why we're not supposed to judge people, all we see is their present, which might come from physical or emotional damage affecting their present self.

Whose to say how much memory is fully about who we are and how much it is a collection of adaptations and distortions that we think makes who we feel we are.

That's not to say sudden changes aren't dramatic, but that such changes are a barrier to conceptions of an afterlife.

Or, at the very least, it's not all that difficult to contemplate the implications. I did it in a quick comment!

Christy said...

I've a relation who has amnesia from a carjacking incident. He has never regained his memory and I've never been able to catch him in any remembrances from before the accident. His personal quirks remain the same. I wouldn't have expected that.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

His personal quirks remain the same.

Some evil scientist, somewhere, is inducing amnesia in identical twins, just to see what happens.