Off the Google Grid

a dispatch from bewilderness

The year I lost my mom and child, I also lost my home and brain, and fell off the edge of the world. Brain injured people are lost and stay lost, tumbled out of life and time.  My new address was, at that time, even off the Google grid. No GPS could get you there. Plus I couldn’t read, write, or use a keyboard — which also left me without any anchor and off any map. Missing chunks of memory and without much language, too.

Paint and collage with woven paper by Judith Hannah Weiss

I was parked in Brain Injury Group which took place in a room I failed to find five days a week for a year. Highlights included:  Watching people’s mouths move while they spoke backwards in Aramaic.  I couldn’t comprehend their words and they couldn’t comprehend mine.

We learned to place big beads, like you see in kindergartens, on a thick non-collapsible cord that stood up straight so we could manage to get our allotted beads on it and keep them there. If it didn’t stand up straight, our beads would roll all over the floor.

Once Ben threw a container of beads at Sam. Before he was bonked on the head, Ben he taught business ethics at a top-tier Ivy school. We had to use our pleasant voice and couldn’t throw things, so Ben was led out of the room.

There were fifteen people in the room and fifteen people not with us. They were who we were before. We were all someone before something hit our head. Then we were someone else. A former FBI agent, a former falafel maker, a former psycholinguistics professor, a former roofer, a former freelance writer (that was me), and a physician who took care of people like us before she became one of us. S

My table had six people. Once I looked down at the floor and found eight legs, when there should have been twelve. We also had ten hands, three wheelchairs and one rollator.

Disability is defined as a describable, measurable condition in which an expected specific human ability is curtailed or absent. In the case of brain damage, it could be defined as a condition in which an expected human is curtailed or absent. It’s not a brief derailment like a flat tire or a wrong turn. It’s like the rail is gone and so are you.