THERE IS A CERTAIN SWEETNESS IN BEING BRAIN DAMAGED

THE SWEETNESS OF BRAIN DAMAGE

   There is a certain sweetness in being brain damaged.  Its like waking into a new world, as surreal and incomprehensible as finding yourself in a place you've never seen before, as abstract as being on another planet or being an observer during the time the dinosaurs walked the earth.

    It feels like you have nothing in common with your surroundings, don't speak the language, can't understand what you're seeing.  You're caught between wonder & absolute terror & you spend every waking moment searching for something - a word, a thought, a memory - anything to remind you of who you are, what you used to be.  The beauty of it all was understanding words; fear, resentment, anger, pain, despair, among others, and not remembering what those things felt like or ever suffering the effects of them. 
   If I had known what was in store, I would have done anything I could to have stayed in this safe & ignorant fugue state.  There's something to be said about not knowing any better, not needing to look outside of my small world, not needing any answers & not even being aware that there might be some questions.
   A part of me wanted to hold on to that sweetness forever.  I wanted to forget there was something and someone locked inside of me, someone who did, indeed, know better, who had no sins, no regrets, no ghosts waiting to haunt what was left of me, no demons waiting for that first hint of insight & cognition.

THE CURSE OF COGNITION

   I knew that sweetness was over, long gone, when pieces of my past started coming back.  It was like looking down at a corpse you don't recognize and seeing you have blood on your hands or finding yourself on death row knowing but not remembering you've committed the most heinous of crimes.  I'll never forget looking at my hands, clean as they were & looking around this brain injury unit I had been in for the past two weeks & thinking, " Oh my God, What have I done? "
   For the life of me, I couldn't remember anything horrible or evil, didn't think I was one of those people who intentionally did things out of harm or bad intention.  From that point where I knew there was something that brought me here, each piece of cognition hit me like a sledgehammer to my soul.    
   My very first thought was realizing I had never looked my precious brother Gary in the eye & told him how much I loved him, how much he had helped me before he died.  Like flipping through a stack of baseball cards, hundreds of memories flashed before me, each one an opportunity I missed when I could have done so. 
   Each flash, each picture that appeared showed me an example of the boy, the man he had been, the kindnesses and unconditional love and loyalty he had shown me; the cruise he had taken me on after an illness, the day I graduated from beauty school & he had taken the time from his busy schedule to see me clock out that last time, the night I got my 30 day chip at an AA meeting. 
   The more I remembered, the deeper my heart sank.  How in the world could I have missed this?  What kind of person could not cherish someone like Gary & taken just one chance, one moment to stop. look and give thanks?  What kind of monster doesn't know an angel, a savior when he's been right in front of you for an entire lifetime? 
   It was far worse than I thought.  There was so much more than blood on my hands.  From what I could recall, my crimes were much greater than murder, more grave than any assault, any felony.  In trying to answer 'what have I done?', there would be no way I would ever really know the depths of it.  If I lived another 50 years, I could never understand any of it, never be able to look myself in the eye and not see anything worthy of redemption or peace.
  

















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