IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Have Amnesia
The Washington Post profiles Su Meck, a 45-year-old homemaker who graduated from Montgomery College with an associate degree in music after suffering a devastating brain injury 23 years ago that left her “the mental capacity of a young child” and unable to “read or write, walk or eat, dress or drive”:
In February 1988, a ceiling fan fell on Meck’s head. The blow erased her memory, and … [s]he no longer knew her husband or her two baby sons. …
“It was Su 2.0,” said Jim Meck, her husband, a systems engineer. “She had rebooted.” …
“It was literally like she had died,” Jim said. “Her personality was gone.” …
Friends and loved ones were now strangers. Many found Su’s empty gaze unbearable. …
Su left the hospital after two months. She had completed a checklist of tasks, such as riding a bicycle, preparing a meal and reading a simple children’s book. New Su’s first book was Dr. Seuss’s “Hop on Pop.” …
There was a big hole at the center. Who was she? Why had she married this man, moved to this house, had these children? What thoughts lurked in the mind of the woman who lifted her baby boy from the kitchen floor that fateful day? …
To complicate matters, for weeks after the injury Su could not make new memories. She would awaken each day to a house full of strangers. …
For years, her life as a wife and mother was all Su knew, all she had ever known. She learned her times tables from her children and volunteered at the school library so she could hide in the stacks and read. …
Nineteen years after the accident, in 2007, Su walked into a classroom as if for the first time.
Her children were heading off to college themselves. Su yearned to be known as something other than mother and wife. It was the familiar dilemma of the stay-at-home mom, except that this mom knew nothing else. …
Su was a slow learner — her husband can read eight pages to her one. She plodded through assignments, reading difficult passages again and again so she would remember them. …
She persevered in the quest for her first college degree, earning a 3.9 average and rising to chapter president of the Phi Theta Kappa honor society. …
Su went through two decades of adult life without telling anyone outside her inner circle that she had no memory of the previous two decades. She didn’t want to be pitied.
The story finally poured out one day last spring at the college, when someone in the honor society asked other members to each bring five things that meant something to them.
Su brought “Hop on Pop.”
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