“I Forgot to Remember”: Living with amnesia - Salon.com: “She never knew me, and I know nothing of her except what people have told me. She rebelled; I conform. She broke rules; I follow them. She drank and smoked pot; I don’t even know the taste of beer or wine, and the smell of smoke makes me physically ill. I like vegetables; she hated them. She loved to swim; I am absolutely terrified of the water.” These lines, from Su Meck’s new memoir, “I Forgot to Remember,” describe not a long-lost mother or sister or friend, but Su Meck herself, for the first 22 years of her life. Today’s Su Meck has no memory of those years.
One afternoon in 1988, Meck, a young wife and mother of two living in Fort Worth, Texas, picked up her youngest son with a shout of “Wheeee!” The 8-month-old infant apparently knocked loose a precariously-hung ceiling fan, and the fan fell, striking Su Meck on the head and changing her life forever. “I died in a way,” Meck writes, “and was reborn, in the same physical form but not the same mind.”
As for what happened next, Meck can’t be entirely sure.