I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck Page B

back at Ohio Wesleyan, we “went from being friends to being friends-with-benefits and eventually to a committed and exclusive relationship.” He talksabout how he and I “would finish each other’s sentences.” He says we were inseparable and “when we were together, we were simply more.” And now that particular Su that Jim had known was gone. I was utterly naive not only sexually, but emotionally as well. I just wasn’t ready for such adult feelings, and wouldn’t be for a few years.

5

You’ve Got A Friend
    —James Taylor
    M ichele Hargett had been my college roommate at Ohio Wesleyan my sophomore year, and my maid of honor at my wedding. She is still one of my best friends. Michele wanted me to return the favor and come to South Carolina and be a bridesmaid at her wedding to Lynn Abbott in the fall of 1988. She knew of my injury and hospitalization. But even so, Jim tried to explain to her just how much I had lost, and how different I was. With the exception of driving from Fort Worth to my parents’ house in Houston, I hadn’t gone on any trips since my injury. I certainly had never been on an airplane. But it was decided that we would all drive to Jim’s parents’ house in Cedartown, Georgia, and then fly me up to Charleston, where the wedding was to be held. Jim would spend theweek in Cedartown, and then drive up the following weekend for the ceremony, leaving the boys with his parents. Michele mentioned to me much later that she recalls asking Jim if I was going to be able to handle coming, and Jim reassuring her, “We’re good.”
    Jim tried to prepare me for a plane flight from Atlanta to Charleston. He carefully explained the concept of a numbered seat, and where my luggage would go when the airline people took it. Who knows for sure what exactly happened on that flight. Maybe I blacked out and people just thought I was sleeping. Maybe I was totally obnoxious, asking my poor seat mate or the flight attendant a million questions. Maybe I cried because I didn’t know what was happening or where I was going. Maybe I was totally silent, sitting there gripping the arms of my seat hoping for somebody familiar to show up and tell me what to do. Fortunately, Michele was waiting right there at the gate at the Charleston airport. Jim had warned her that I most likely would not know who she was, but surprisingly, I seemed to recognize her. Michele thinks that Jim must have prompted me with pictures, or maybe I just saw someone coming toward me with outstretched arms. Michele says, “We shared a big hug!”
    She had been playing tennis one day in May of 1988 when a mutual friend told her about my injury: “She had the funniest accident. A ceiling fan fell on her head.” Michele recalls feeling sick. “I think I sent a care package,” she recalls. But she didn’t realize the extent of the damage until she received my first letter. “It was a thank-you letter, thanking me for the package I had sent,” she remembers. “What shocked me wasn’t the content of the letter, it was how basic it was. The level was just so low, and you were just always so brilliant, so intelligent. And that was the first time it jarred me as to how serious this was.”
    At her parents’house in Charleston, Michele and I slept together in a queen-size bed in one of the guest bedrooms.
    “I’d get up and start moving around each morning,” Michele recalls. “And every single day, the whole week before the wedding, the first words out of your mouth were, ‘Where’s Jim?’ And I would say, ‘Jim’s back home with the kids.’ And then I’d ask, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And you’d say, ‘No.’ And then I’d say, ‘I’m Michele Hargett. I’m your college roommate from Ohio Wesleyan, and you are here for my wedding.’ And then, as you got up and going, it was like everything settled back into place, and you would lose your ‘glazed’ look. You would eventually know where you were, and why you were there, but