I began writing my husband a series of letters when it became clear that he could no longer make new memories. Or remember the old ones, for that matter—the ones we had made together. When Dave woke up from a near fatal stroke, age thirty, beautiful, seemingly strong and outwardly intact, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. As his eyes blinked open, those green eyes that had first pulled me in, he stared at me with this terrifying and alien expression: utter blankness. Those were not Dave’s eyes—those were not the eyes I knew, the conduit into the mind I knew, the mind stocked with deep feelings and well-worn love and fast-paced thoughts and so many memories, so many hopes in the present and plans for the future. No, those were just two vacant eyeballs that gave utterance to nothing more than a harrowing void, a mind wiped clean. The mind of my husband, wiped clean.

So I decided to write to him. I opened up my laptop and began typing, saving the Word document as “DearDave.doc” because that was how the first letter began. Dear Dave, Tonight you turned to me on the airplane and told me that you couldn’t see anything out of your right eye. They were terrible words to write. Nevertheless, in some way I did not yet understand, I knew that I needed to write them. I would write it all down so that if Dave ever came back to me, he could read them. I would provide the memories that Dave could not make on his own, so that he could know what he went through. What we went through. And we could, hopefully, heal together.