servant
MEMORY IS A servant, faithful not only to the believed past but also to the imagined future. This is what I think when I hear how people want Richard to be some version of the man they remember. It’s important for visitors to say something positive when they arrive. He looks good, friends and family say, when they come to town. They look up at Richard’s tall, manly frame, and though his shoulder hunches toward his ear in postsurgical postural disregard, guarding his maimed side, they picture him as strong, reliable, mindful, competent. The shell is the thing important to preserve: behold, after our likeness he shall be created.
I thought I knew what made Richard my lover, his children’s father, his family’s brother. When I look in his eyes, permanently wide with that stare, I witness the absence of forethought. Experience is writ upon his face the very second of its apprehension, as if he’s a newborn, as if some Demiurge has just fashioned him from clay.
We learn the nature of forgetting. We begin to notice what has already been forgotten by him—forgetfulness streams into yesterday and today, shadows tomorrow as a flooded Lethe. Gone are even the most mundane things, the things we take for granted: how to form sentences, make a call, go places, get angry, use a computer, remember ideas and names and people and his children’s lives and his work and his family and the muscles in his anatomy textbooks. My former husband, I am starting to see, is no longer present.
I want to learn about the workings of his brain, and the parts of his mind and memory that may not ever return. But right now we are stalled, waiting to see if speech therapy changes anything.
In the meantime, some friends think it’s a good idea for us to have a meditator around, to create an environment of peace. People make calls. We learn about a group of Tibetan Buddhist monks who have come to a community center near Dylan’s school. They are spending a week meticulously nudging grains of sand into a mandala they will then sweep to nothingness. I drive Richard to see them. We take a tiny bag of sand from the beaches of Bermuda, a gift his mother left behind before she died. We hold it out to them.
“We have special sand for this purpose,” the monk says, rejecting our coarse grains.
We tell our story to the monk in charge.
“Can you send the lama to come see my husband?” I ask. I already know by the look on his face that a home visit is impossible. But the next day we get a call from the monk I spoke to, telling us the lama’s assistant will be coordinating their trip to our apartment. I’m asked to make special food and home preparations.
“He’s never done this before,” the monk says.
“What’s that?” I ask, confused.
“Come to the home of a family.”
On the day of the visit we have prepared a meal these Tibetans will eat—vegetarian—and we’ve cleaned the house, and dressed in clean clothes. We sit in our tiny apartment, barely big enough to hold the three of us. The lama and the American translator arrive. We’re introduced. He is Lama Lharampa Geshe Ngawang Lungtok of the Gaden Lhopa Khangtsen of the Monastic University in Karnataka, India, home to six thousand monks, and also a place where the Dalai Lama teaches. The translator tells us that the lama will transform himself into the body of Vajravidaran, a Buddha of radiant light and healing. Dylan and I smile at each other across the living room. We can’t wait to see what that looks like.
The translator takes clay from a plastic bag and makes bowls that he tells us will hold our “poison”—all of the negative words, acts, and deeds we have ever done. He gives us herbal water that we swish in our mouths and then spit into this dough effigy. He asks us to give up all of the unkindnesses that have ever been done to us. The lama chants around Richard’s body. The translator tells us he’s transforming all Richard’s negative energy into pure, radiant bliss. There hasn’t been anything other than wonder in that man’s mind for a month, I want to say, but I don’t say a word because the ritual is nonstop spitting and swishing. Then the lama makes the magic signs on Dylan and me, and when I start to giggle, we try not to look at each other. Herbed water is poured over our heads. The translator tells us the lama is blessing us. Next, the lama takes a peacock feather and swishes it around our bodies. The translator says he is making a protective sphere. The lama ties a red thread necklace around Richard’s neck and asks him not to take it off. The translator hands us three packets of red-brown pellets.
“The crushed remains of the lamas for generations and the prayers of ten thousand lamas including the Dalai Lama,” the translator says. (Or this is what I hear. Years later, Dylan will tell me that she thought he said the tears of ten thousand lamas. Whereupon I think, wow, that would be some medicine.)
“Would you like to have anything else blessed?” he asks.
“Like what?”
“Medicine, lotions, water.”
I go running for my flower essence cream, bowls of water, Richard’s vitamins.
“When these are used, now each being will be transformed by this same radiant light.”
“What about his memory loss?” I ask.
The translator and the lama exchange words. They look at Richard, then toward me.
“From the Tibetan perspective, the memory loss is not such a bad thing,” the translator says.
We all laugh. I think he is kidding. We sit down at our tiny table in the kitchen nook, and the Tibetan eats nothing.
“They don’t eat salad,” the translator says, “only hot things.”
“I can make him a sandwich,” I say, but they shake their heads. It’s time for them to go.
After the Tibetans leave, I’m not sure why we invited them. My faith that any ritual, remedy, or medicine can change things is already unraveling. I really want to believe in something, anything, that will bring Richard healing, which we define as a return to his former self. I’m not yet willing to see that coming to peace with reality may be an easier path. We take the lama pellets, and we drink the water, and we use the blessed cream on his scars. I will not stop imagining there is a cure for silence and forgetting.
We try everything to help him remember. We repeat things. We tell stories. We show him photographs. Dylan continues the practice of taking pictures. She discovers the camera lens can swing 360 degrees, and she becomes enthralled with capturing herself. Arm extended, she snaps images of herself in wigs, togas, tights; dressed as a man; coifed for prom; putting on expressions from dainty to disgusting. She posts some of them online. She says she’s tracking who she is in these given moments and she wants to know how she’s perceived, she wants to know how people respond to the snapshots she’s posted for public view.
I think these kinds of self-portraits come from the same place as Frida Kahlo’s painted images of herself; they’re for emotional catharsis, to track the self in its ongoing mission to hide and to reveal. Dylan doesn’t want to lose the father she’s known, the capable, clear, commanding one. Our daughter cries, always away from her father, usually about his uncomprehending eyes, his distant expression, his empty persona: “Mama, why is he so much like a child?”
When people from his past hear Richard has lost his memory of his former life, they send photographs from his boyhood: inevitably, pictures of the theatrical, gregarious person he used to be, portraits of him mugging, striking a pose, evoking guarded macho-shadow in his gaze. Our daughter places these old images in the album next to the photo of our family taken after we came home from the hospital. In it, her father is lean, calm; his eyes are gaping, exposed. When you look closely, though, you can see the part never lost is his urge to love.
A shaman of Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) and Celtic lineage comes, along with a writing mentor, to do a shamanic journey on Richard’s behalf. I met them at a writers’ retreat years ago. They were each called to healing after being afflicted by their own “sacred illnesses.” They offer this traditional indigenous ceremony as a gift to us. We’re not afraid to consider whatever might be most healing: Western medicine, Eastern medicine, ancient forms. Not only do we have a history of being spiritually curious, we have nothing to lose.
In the time we’ve been married, though we are not churchgoers, we have experimented with a variety of spiritual traditions. Sifu, the Zen master, taught me discipline and acceptance of life’s conditions. We attended a Sufi Movement camp high in the Canadian Rockies. We tried a communal council and healing ritual called a Daré, from an African tradition. I explored nature-based faiths, our Celtic ancestors. I researched the scientific basis for prayer and meditation. So while the specific spiritual practices of various traditions came and went, our sense of ourselves as spiritual people living with the conditions of the everyday did not change. Among our lasting practices was saying grace at supper; our meditations came in daily activities—cooking, sex, walks in nature. We stayed quiet a little bit every day. We learned how to be kind to one another. We practiced speaking the truth, as we knew it to be. We tried not to fake life, but to be really ourselves.
When Richard first became ill with cancer, he was comfortable in the role of healer; he was not at all proficient in accepting help. He identified as adept, accomplished, athletic, and sometimes smartass. He was not dependent on others and he had made a habit of requiring almost nothing from anyone he knew. When we were healthy, before the cancer arrived, we held a healing ceremony in our home once each month, where anyone could come and be heard. Eventually, after the diagnosis, Richard allowed himself to be drawn to the center of the circle, to accept support from others, to tell of his fear of loss.
In my shock and grief, I want to do anything I can to recover my former husband. When people ask us if they can do a ritual on our behalf, we receive it. So the healer and mentor bring in their drums and spiritual artifacts. As part of the ritual, the women ask Richard to make an offering.
“What is an offering?” he says.
I go to the room where they’re preparing and ask the shaman women to clarify. I walk back to where Richard is lying on the ground, a patchwork quilt over his body. I lean into his face and whisper.
“It’s something of yourself that you can offer up to the spirits on behalf of this ceremony,” I tell him.
“I offer my life in service to healing others,” Richard says.
The rest of the ceremony is beautiful, but it doesn’t impact me as much as those words. I already see that my husband knows something I do not know. Something about resilience and generosity and love. A door opens.
The anxiety that kept him isolated in his bedroom lessens. Two months after our return home, he can walk into a dark movie theater in the middle of the day as long as the film is kind.
During the early stages of his recovery, when we can’t find anyone to confirm the brain injury, I’m swimming in the desire to believe and belong. I talk with mentors, healers, and friends in recovery, hoping that someone has the magic that will shift our situation.
“Richard stays in bed for days on end,” I whisper into the phone. “He can’t talk to anyone about what’s going on inside him. He can’t do many of the things that he used to do.”
When I stop feeling sorry for my situation, I write in my journal, in our newfound silence:
THINGS THAT HAVE CHANGED (IN RICHARD)
AFTER THE BRAIN INJURY:
1. He rarely speaks.
2. His eyes are watchful.
3. He calls me “sweetness.”
4. He can’t remember five minutes ago.
5. Instead of sleeping on his back, legs splayed on the bed, arms behind his head, he sleeps on his side, legs and arms tucked close to his body, taking up the smallest space possible. He sleeps like this a lot.
6. He can’t go out where there are people.
7. All of his appetites return, and are more pronounced.
8. He cries. Every day. He doesn’t laugh; he smiles.
9. He rarely looks to others for validation.
10. He doesn’t complain.
11. When asked what he wants, he asks what you want.
12. He has no agenda. He does what I want. He does what anyone asks of him.
13. His body thrums at a beat-beat-beat instead of a rat-a-tat-tat-tat. (I met another man with a TBI who said his wife divorced him because she couldn’t stand to lie next to his altered energy at night.)
14. Hours, days, without words.
15. He wants to know who I am, even if he won’t remember it.
16. His reaction time is slower.
17. He’s afraid to enter the world and yet he has a deep longing to help others.
18. He does one thing at a time. He isn’t thinking about other things while he does this.
19. He likes foods he used to hate.
20. He forgets the distant past. He sometimes forgets the recent past. There is no pattern or logic to what is forgotten.
This will take us years to know.