…in the rehabilitation hospital after my stroke.
Four years ago, I’d had a stroke while gardening. The doctors told me I was lucky. I recovered my speech and most of my movement. What I never got back were about eighteen months of memory, the months right before and after the stroke. My doctor called it a hole. For me, it was simply blank.
I knew things had happened in that time. My son, Kevin, had died in a motorcycle accident during it. People told me about the funeral. I had no memory of it at all.
I looked at the photograph again. The baby in my arms had Kevin’s ears.
It took me a week to find the young mother. I asked the cashier at the supermarket if she knew her. She did — her name was Jess, and she worked at the pharmacy across the street. I wrote her a letter instead of showing up. I told her the truth: that I had had a stroke, that I had lost part of my memory, that I didn’t remember her or the hospital. And I asked her, please, to tell me who her son was.
She called me two days later. We met at a park.
Jess had been Kevin’s girlfriend. They’d been together a year when she got pregnant. Kevin was killed three weeks before the baby, Noah, was born. Kevin had told me about Jess — I just couldn’t remember it.
After the funeral, I’d been kind to her. I visited, brought food, sang to Noah. Then, during one visit, I’d had what the doctors later called a mini-stroke. At the hospital, confused and frightened, I had grabbed Jess’s arm and shouted that I would take Noah away from her because she couldn’t take care of him.
“You didn’t know what you were saying,” Jess told me. “But I didn’t know that then. I was twenty-two and terrified. Your sister said it would be better if you didn’t see him again. I believed her.”
My sister had never told me any of this. When I called her, she broke down. She had thought she was protecting me. The doctors had said I needed calm. She decided a grandchild and a grieving girlfriend were too much.
She’d also decided, without asking me, that I would never know my only grandson.
Jess and I talked for three hours on that bench. Noah played on the swings. At the end, he ran back to us and climbed onto my lap as if he had done it a hundred times.
“Grandma Helen,” he said. “Will you sing the moon song?”
I didn’t know the moon song. Jess sang the first line. And somewhere deep inside the part of my memory that never came back, I found the second.
Now Noah sleeps over every Friday. Jess and I take turns making pancakes. I don’t remember the day I first held him. But I’ll remember every day from now on.
