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By contrast with my newfound connection with my dad, ever since I was released from the hospital, there had been the cloud of the pills and everything else hanging over my mother and me. I think it's precisely because of how close my mother and I had been prior to my illness that our relationship suffered. Perhaps because my dad had been more of a footnote in my life, whereas my mom was a dominant force, it was easier for my father to engage with this "new" me.
To cope, my mom actively rewrote the narrative of my disease, insisting that I was "never really that bad" and that she "always knew I would recover." I was too strong to be sick forever, she told herself. She couldn't come to terms with the fact that I wasn't yet fully recovered until one afternoon in midsummer when we went out to eat, just the two of us, at J.B. Winberie's in Summit. It was a magnificent evening, with a slight breeze rustling the umbrellas above the patio furniture, so we took seats outdoors and ordered fish entrees and a glass of white wine each.
As we ate, I began to ask her questions about how I had behaved during those days in Summit before I was admitted to the hospital. I still had only nebulous recollections, mostly of things that had turned out to be hallucinations, and I wasn't sure what was real or not. The whole thing was still a mystery to me, and I wasn't sure what was real or not. The whole thing was still a mystery to me, and I was eager to piece together what had happened.
"You were just out of your mind," she said. "Do you remember when you had your EEG done?"
EEG? "No, I don't." But after some rehearsing, I did remember something: the nurse at Dr. Bailey's office with her strobe light. Unlike the unnerving scene in the hospital video, when my experience of those moments was likely never encoded in my brain at all this memory had been made and stored. The problem was retrieving it. When the brain is working to remember something, similar patterns of neurons fire as they did during the perception of the original event. These networks are linked, and each time we revisit them, they become stronger and more associated. But they need the proper retrieval cues- word, smells, images- for them to be brought back as memories.
Watching me struggle to remember this, my mom's face flushed, and her lower lips quivered. She buried her face in her hands; it was the first time I had seen her cry since long before I was sick.
"I'm better now, Mom. Don't cry."
"I know, I know. I'm being silly," she said. "Oh, and you were totally nuts. You walked into a restaurant and demanded food. Just demanded it. Although I guess that's not too far outside your normal personality"
We laughed. Just for a brief moment, I could picture the rows of booths in the dinner and a blurry man behind the countertop handing me coffee. this recovered image taunted me with the echoes of all the other moments I had forgotten and would never get back. And then it was gone.
More than just the recovery of a memory, though this was the turning point when my mom finally conceded how afraid she had been, revealing through her tears that she hadn't always been certain that I would be "fine." And with that simple, natural gesture, our relationship rounded a corner. She once again became my ultimate confidante, companion, and supporter. It took accepting how close I had come to death (something impossible before, because it was her survival mechanism to deny) to finally allow us to move forward together.