Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Judith Hannah Weiss

Word Count 1767

A scruffy green angel is floating under ceiling lights, looking upside down at me. Things are beeping. Beeping means someone’s alive. I am strapped on a board, looking up at the world. The scruffy angel asks me a question. I point to my head.

My brain broke up with me. Rather, my brain broke up in me and sometimes it shows on my face. I pray that it won’t, but I know that it does. It happens when I have to be somewhere I can’t find or do something I can’t do or say something I can’t say. There are no words. This is called aphasia.

I spent decades telling folks how to prevent everything bad, protect everything important, and procure everything good. All they wanted or needed to know, have, want, wear, buy, try, lose, use, taste, sip, skip, slip into or out of. That was called freelance writing. My clients were the corporations that owned the brands known as Oprah and Elmo and Martha Stewart, and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog.

Still tethered to the board, I just keep looking up. The angel comes back.

The world is divided into things I used to know, things I never knew, and things I won’t know a moment from now. This is called amnesia.

I’m not an expert on brain injury. I am a person who has one after being hit by a truck. Those three words are rarely seen together, “Person. Brain. Injury.” In cartoons, people like me are hilarious, especially in the scenes where skulls get smashed. Think baseball bats, frying pans, and coconuts on craniums.

One moment I was someone. Then I was someone else. The first person could tweezer words like gems, stringing them like beads so they stayed where they belong. Imagine bulbs digging themselves out of Earth. Plaque scraping itself off your teeth. Stuffing sucked out of your sofa. You wrenched out of you.

Images flicker faster than I can comprehend them, faster than I can name them, way too fast to contain or connect them. Thing with feathers is a bird, thing with milk is a cow, the thing that barks is a dog, thing that purrs is a cat, thing with holes is a belt, thing you lost is your mind.

A torrent of present, past and future shoot in and out of my skull like projectiles. The tester asks me to name the months of the year. I say October or Tuesday or Mary or May. I want to say, Please give me a sign, something to go by. I can’t use my phone. I don’t know my address.

My name is J. I used to have a name with more letters, but that was before the truck. They test my head hundreds of times and find lots of things have disappeared. Like the file that encodes new memories and the file that integrates physical movements so you don’t fall out of your chair. This is called traumatic brain injury.

I am staring at a blinking thing on a screen. Then at the thing you push with your hand. I curse the nameless blinking thing, then recall its name. A cursor, of course. I am impaired and can’t be repaired. The doctor told me so. She spoke with all the sensitivity she likely lost over years. They need to replace the memory board. The logic board. The chipset. The plug-ins. They can’t.

You don’t hit bottom with fist-clenching, door-slamming fury, choking back sobs. You hit not knowing you’ve hit, too damaged to know how damaged you are. You can’t make dinner. You can’t make love. You can’t give yourself a good talking to.

The things that could comfort me, that had comforted me before – the things I loved, you know, books, poems, photographs, pillows, throws, the kitchen sink – take all this away, and you might as well start life as some other person. I did.

Which brings us to Brain Training. I am looking at people whose names I don’t know. They are the same people whose names I don’t know five days a week, in the same room I can’t find five days a week, too. We are learning which is a cup and which is a hammer and which is a spoon or a bird or a bell.

The angel returns. I mime drinking from a bottle because I can’t say “thirsty” or “water” or “drink. “When a plane crashes, they look for the black box and try to put the intact pieces together. When a truck crashes into a human, there’s no black box. “You” try to find any recognizable part of the person you were before you were torn apart.

If you’re on board an eighteen-hour flight from Singapore to New York, you have multiple plausible answers for simple questions—where you are, what time it is. The same with brain damage. Past, present, and future meld together, like one jumbled moment. Let’s see, there’s breakfast, shower, kindergarten, lunch, college, dinner, movie, childbirth, career, death of mom, truck, friends, shopping, floss and brush.

Brain damage grows around you like fuzz or fur. Inhibits you, inhabits you. I have “more or less aphasia” combined with “more or less amnesia” at any given time. There are a few other problems, too. Like the phone weighs two hundred pounds. So does my right hand. My left hand weighs slightly less. My feet weigh slightly more.

A tester asks me to point to a teapot, an apple, a plate, a spoon. This is called “confrontational naming” and includes questions like “What is a squirrel? What is a shovel? What is a large animal with a trunk?” First, I couldn’t do this. Then I still couldn’t do it.

They show me another picture and ask what it might be. It might be anything, anywhere. That’s not the answer they want, so they ask again what it might be. It might be yellow or shallow, hither and yon. A duck, a place to hide, a pond.

It might be nectar, twig or seed, skein, spool, thread, weed, thirst, pain, hunger, need. I narrow my eyes. I hold my breath. My shoulders shoot up to my ears. I want to say, please bring me a glass of water and I can’t.

In a few weeks, words start coming back, just not the right words most of the time. I am asked something simple. My adrenaline kicks in, my breathing gets faster, my heart rate gets faster, I start to sweat. I have “frontotemporal lobar degeneration,” “frequent phonetic breakdowns,” plus “articulatory groping and phonetic disintegration.” That means I can’t name things. It might be a rock, a rose, a dress. A chair, a house, a mouse, a mess.

My “graphomotor set-shifting,” and my “visual integration” are described in reports as extreme, devastating, severe and unusual. There were other problems, too. Like stretch marks on my brain. No, really, I now have “stretch marks in my brain.”

A tester instructs me to push a lever. The right lever or the left. This will help quantify what is left of my right brain. I am listening with everything I have. I am doing everything with everything I have. And it is not enough.

Sometimes I’m taken to Brain Injury Group. One of our members is a former attorney named Maggie who began each meeting by saying “grace” and ended with a gratitude prayer. A few months ago, she died. I wrote this piece for her.

We are missing persons,

Missing the persons we used to be

Some of us were lawyers or teachers

Or Special Troops in conflict zones

Which were once called wars

Some were parents

Some have parents

Some have toddlers

Some speak like toddlers

Or don’t speak

We come from small towns and big towns, war zones, farms, food carts, and factories. We whipped up soufflés and symphonies, grew stem cells, kale, or quarterbacks. A strange mix of genius, forensics, falafels, and cognitive disconnects.

Phil’s first mind was lost in Iraq. Steve skied into a tree. One guy was taken down in Fallujah. One was “taken down” while taking down his Christmas lights. Sharon Anne was serving lunch when she was hit by a ceiling fan. That plays as funny in a cartoon.

We now include a baker, a builder, a preacher, a teacher, and a former professor of psycholinguistics. There’s also the former physician who took care of people like us before she became one of us.

We all have plaque in our brain, not Grammys or Oscars. Some of us know it. Plaque can advance like armies in the night, taking more and more of us, leaving less and less.

Sometimes we have a vague notion of how it felt to write or dance or bake or bike or hike or tend a rose or swing a bat or catch the breeze off a beach. Other times we can't say the names of our kids.

It’s like you’re going along trying to put one word in front of the other when the engine fails and the wheels fall off. You can’t say surprised. You can’t say uplifted. You can’t say inspired. You can’t say lost.

You can’t say rose or tree or bird. Things you can’t say remind you of other things you can’t say. There are no instant results, there are no guarantees, and there is no cure. Experts in brain injury have, of course, never suffered brain damage. While we who have suffered brain damage will never be experts in anything.

I still lose pieces of my mind, different pieces at different times. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle of the United States. Kansas drops out. Then the entire Northwest is gone. Kansas reappears, but there’s no mid-Atlantic. San Diego disappears along with Chicago and Santa Fe. Chicago reappears.

Disability is defined as a describable, measurable condition in which an expected specific human ability is curtailed or absent. In the case of brain damage, it could be defined as a condition in which an expected human is curtailed or absent. There are one billion disabled people in the world. In real life, we’re seen as unattractive and inconvenient, if we’re seen at all.

Eighteen years post-truck, I still need words I can’t find to say things I can’t say. If I were a car, the check engine light would be on all the time. Yet some things start coming back. I remember the scent of oranges studded with cloves. The scent of snow before it falls. And the scent of gingerbread baked with my mom.

Judith freelanced for Time Warner, Conde Nast, Disney, and PBS. Then was hit by a drunk with a truck, which put a few things on hold. She now lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she makes art for humans and homes for birds. Post-truck work has appeared on NBC News, The Washington Post, Iowa Review, The Rumpus, Creative Nonfiction, Intima, The Narrative Medicine Journal of Columbia University, Bellevue Literary Review, Salmagundi, Oldster and is upcoming this fall in Pulse. In addition, she has received these and other commendations: finalist for The Iowa Review’s Nonfiction Book Prize, winner of the 44th and 45th New Millennium Writing Awards. www.judithhannahweiss.com https://judithhannahweiss.substack.com/