Things I can't say. Plus bubblegum.
...a dispatch from bewilderness
Some things don’t work. For example, McDonald’s once made broccoli-flavored bubblegum to help kids want healthy foods. Kids didn’t like it. Here’s another thing. There are no direct routes between the person I am and the person I was and the things I saw and read and loved.
A few months after the accident, I heard someone in scrubs look at me and say the word “Miracle.” She meant if I could ever regain my former life, it would be a “miracle.” And that meant I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. It couldn’t. It wouldn’t. That was nineteen years ago.
In my first life, words were how I made sense of chaos or at least attempted to. They also paid our bills and powered my career. Words could be tender, useful, important. Even healing. Or essential. But then? There were no words. All things were unsayable.
Words were my job. Words were my craft. I felt like my home had been torn from its foundation, because words felt like home, and then they did not. I Then our home was not our home. The home we lived in was not our home anymore. It was sold to pay the medical bills.
When your brain breaks, so does your present and future and past. It’s like hearing a radio stuck on static most of the time, then finding something that comes through clear. No, it’s like being a radio stuck on static, then being someone who comes in clear. Once in a while, my swollen brain coughed up pieces of my past. Then nothing emerged at all.
The most common form of amnesia after a traumatic brain injury is anterograde amnesia, which means you can’t make new memories, like what you just heard saw or what someone just told you to do. In retrograde amnesia, the brain is unable to retrieve memories you made before, like the day your child took her first steps or said her first words. I had both.
Thank for this, and for all the others, too. You express things so well, and some of what you write applies also to those of us who are simply aging and forgetting and forgetting.....And that helps.
Hi Judith, Thank you for sharing this so openly. What an immense thing to carry—losing both what was and what was just beginning. And still, here you are, remembering in your own way, shaping story from what remains. There’s a fierce kind of beauty in that. Even when memory falters, your spirit, your voice, your being continue to speak. That matters. You matter. And the way you are showing up now is unforgettable.