My Life, Deleted (12 page)

Chapter 11

W
ITH ALL THESE FINANCIAL WORRIES,
I really needed something more positive to think about. What better topic, I decided, than the woman who was caring for me on a daily basis and our twenty-seven-year relationship?

I'd been observing Joan closely for six weeks now, watching her every move and going through our respective things, trying to learn more about her—and us. I looked more closely through the bathroom cabinets one day and was amazed at how many bottles of lotion and nail polish, makeup jars, and hair curlers she had, versus my simple collection of deodorant, cologne, toothbrush, and razors. Her odds and ends took up three times as many drawers and twice as many cabinets as mine.

My conclusion: “Women need a lot more stuff,” I told her.

Joan was no longer a stranger I was living with; she'd become my central life force and the key to rediscovering my lost past. She not only had taken over my former role as head of the household, she was also spearheading the medical quest to diagnose and treat my memory loss. Neither of us liked this switch because she wasn't comfortable with being in charge, but we both knew she was the most qualified person for the job.

We'd shared enough decisions in the past that I had to trust that she'd make the right ones now. Besides, she had become my best friend, the only person to whom I felt comfortable expressing my emotions and exposing my true self. I also sensed that she needed to feel that I needed her and felt an emotional attachment to her.

“It's okay to cry,” she'd say, almost like a therapist, helping me to make sense of my feelings and to accept that they were understandable given my situation. “You can tell me anything. What are you going through?”

These conversations helped me feel that I wasn't crazy after all, and even though I felt weak and vulnerable, they gave me the strength to move forward. She never said this, but she seemed so appreciative of how open I was that I suspected—and she later confirmed—that I hadn't acted like this before.

I'm not sure whether it was because of or in spite of all this, but my feelings for her had slowly evolved from trust and need into something stronger. I wanted to spend more romantic time alone with her than before, without any agenda or lessons about who or what I was supposed to know. I felt different inside when I saw her and happier when I was with her.

I'd been chalking up the traits I most liked and admired about her. She was so loving and had so much integrity. It cracked me up when she laughed and no sound came out or when she made faces, reenacting lines from our favorite movies. She was skilled at finding the right medical care for me. Part mother and part wife to me, she also seemed to be a good mother to the kids; they surely seemed to love her. She enabled me to grow without making me feel self-conscious, sensing when to help and when to let me struggle. She had the bluest eyes and the warmest smile. I loved watching her put on creams at night to protect her skin, and even though she was a neat freak, I too liked order in the house. Her only shortcoming was that she could get a little disorganized and unfocused at times, trying to do too many things at once. But that was nothing in the overall scheme of things. She meant everything to me.

Lately I'd been reacquainting myself with my previous musical taste via my iPod, which contained some three hundred songs ranging from country to classic rock and alternative. One of them, titled “Back Where I Come From” by country singer Kenny Chesney, made me feel lost, yet I almost needed to hear the bittersweet lyrics, which hit me in the gut. The singer reminisces about growing up, raising hell with his friends in Tennessee, and what those relationships still mean to him. Well, I'd lost all those memories, so I would never know how those friendships formed who I was, let alone be able to experience them again.

Joan shared the songs that had meant the most to us since college, and “Faithfully” by Journey best described the essence of our relationship. Joan had been through so much with me since the accident. She'd continued to stick by me, and I'd promised her I would be faithful to her for the rest of our lives.

One of my other favorites was titled “Take Me There,” by country singer Rascal Flatts, about a man who wants to learn about the woman he's in love with. This one didn't hurt me to listen to; it inspired me because I related so much to the lyrics: “I want to know everything about you, I want to go down every road you've been.”

This was exactly how I felt about Joan. If I wanted to put together the jigsaw puzzle of my missing life, it made sense to start with her, one of its crucial corners. Who was she? Where did she grow up? What was our first kiss like?

One evening when we were alone, Joan curled up next to me, her head leaning back on a pillow so she could look into my eyes, her legs diagonally across mine. It seemed like the perfect moment. My memory wasn't returning, so it was time to start pulling the other edge pieces from the puzzle box and putting the frame together.

“So tell me about the time we first met,” I said.

Joan's voice was bubbly and her face was glowing as she started at the beginning. We met, she said, at my college roommate Jeff's party in South Holland, Illinois, on a warm night in 1981, the summer after my freshman year. The party fell on my birthday, July 25, and although I'd been set up on a blind date with a friend of Jeff's girlfriend, Barb, the girl was a no-show. Coincidentally, Joan had also been set up on a blind date by Barb, a friend from high school in Tinley Park. When Joan showed up, I thought she was my date for the evening and was disappointed to learn that this cute girl was someone else's setup. After being stood up, I spent the evening talking to the same friends I saw every day.

At this point Joan stopped the story to tell me coyly, “If you'd told me it was your birthday, I would have given you a birthday kiss, and maybe my blind date would never have happened.”

We didn't meet again, she said, until the fall, after a long day of football training camp. With my head freshly shaved as a bonding exercise among the offensive linemen, I joined a few teammates at a fraternity party on campus. Joan ran up and started talking to me, and we chatted for a good hour or so, getting to know each other as she stood a couple stairs up from where I was standing so we were at eye level with each other. As part of the starting lineup, I was exhausted from doing two-a-days, or practicing twice a day, but from what I told her, I was focused and driven to succeed.

That fall, Joan said, I took a class on the fundamentals of track—an elective for my physical education major—in which one of her gymnastic teammates was a student teacher. Apparently I asked out this girl, a cute redhead from New York, who was extremely flexible. Joan emphasized this point suggestively, but the remark went over my head.

“You were my second choice then,” I said, prompting Joan to chuckle sardonically.

“No,” she said, “she turned you down.”

Humbly speaking, I couldn't imagine this happening, and although I had no way to prove her wrong, I suspected that Joan had thrown in that detail to tease me.

“It's a good thing she said no because I never would have dated you if you'd gone out with her,” she added quite seriously.

“Why?”

“Because we had a rule that we didn't date a guy who had seen others on the team,” she said, explaining that with their group of only ten women, it would have been too awkward otherwise. That didn't make sense to me—one date with a guy didn't mean he was your boyfriend—but I didn't question it further.

She said Jeff and I used to hang out by the athletic training room at the football stadium, where the football and gymnastics teams both got taped up before practice and iced afterward. Jeff was a fellow offensive lineman, and after we finished our training, we stood in the hallway, watching the girls practice on the uneven parallel bars, bounce on the trampoline, or flip around on the tumbling floor. Our cover story was that we wanted to see what kind of talent they had, but really we just enjoyed watching the girls bend and contort themselves in skintight leotards. The girls were no better; they liked watching us wander around in nothing but shorts.

Barb had talked to Jeff about setting Joan and me up on a double date, but Jeff never discussed this with me. So Joan, thinking this was a done deal, came up to me after practice one day and asked, “So when are we going bowling?”

Knowing nothing about the setup, I thought this sounded like a good idea. “Whenever you want to,” I said.

This whole story made for quite an amusing discovery: Joan, my wife of almost twenty-five years, had pursued me, not the other way around. I had to rub it in. “So
you
asked
me
out?”

After we both laughed over this, I also had to ask her about that stupid rule again. “You really wouldn't have gone out with me if your teammate had said yes to a date with me?”

“Nope,” she said adamantly.

As it turned out, we did go bowling on our first date. I know this doesn't sound very romantic, but we were poor college students.

“I let you win so you wouldn't feel bad,” she said. “Then when we went and ordered a pizza and sodas, you were short a dollar, and I had to lend it to you to cover the bill. Then I asked for it back on our next date.”

“Nothing has changed in twenty-five years, I guess,” I joked.

Afterward, Joan said, we went back to my dorm room and talked into the wee hours. We had an away game later that day and had to leave by 5:00
A.M.
, but I never mentioned the early departure time to Joan or she wouldn't have kept me up that late. We broke it up around 3:00
A.M.,
and I walked her three-quarters of a mile back to her dorm room.

When we got to her door, she said, I asked if I could kiss her good-night. After dating other friends of Jeff's who had been total jerks, she said, she was amazed at how a big guy like me could be such a gentleman. “I knew right then that you were the guy for me,” she told me.

I could see the passion in her eyes and hear it in her voice as she said this, almost as if she was experiencing that moment again for the first time along with me. It took my breath away. Even though I knew intellectually that I'd spent the better part of my life with this woman, I'd really only met her six weeks ago, and I was starting to fall in love with her all over again. Before, I'd been yearning to feel these emotions, and now I actually was. I knew she wouldn't still be here with me if we hadn't formed this strong bond together. It wasn't the kind of tie you could maintain by yourself.

Ready for the next topic, I asked, “How involved were you in my football career at NIU?”

I knew she'd have a different perspective from my teammates about this, and I figured I'd eventually get their perspective. But more than that, I wanted to test her—and myself—to gauge how close we'd been before my accident by exploring how much she knew.

“Very,” she said.

As Joan recounted the next series of stories, I could see that she'd been there with me—and for me—every step of the way. She even knew what I'd been like before we met. I got out all my crazy stuff in my freshman year, she said—lots of dating and drunken parties, getting in fights and waking up in cornfields—so I was ready to have a girlfriend by my sophomore year.

Joan said she came to many of my practices, we saw each other almost every night, and she traveled to almost all my away games in Michigan, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ohio with my mom and dad, who never missed a single game my entire career. Hearing this, I figured Joan must have loved me from the start. Why else would a girl travel that far to see some guy play football every weekend when she could be enjoying parties at school?

Although football was important to me, Joan said it wasn't the sole focus of my life. Though I was talented and knew I was good enough to play in the NFL, always doing my best job on the field, at the end of the day I left it behind. Unlike some of my teammates, I didn't stay after practice to watch film, work out some more, or punish myself if we'd lost a game. I simply grew more determined to do better next time. I also grew to fear and respect my coach, Bill Mallory, who instilled in me the discipline that I applied personally and professionally for the rest of my life.

During my senior year, she said, we were both excited when I was elected one of three team cocaptains. After winning the conference championship in 1983, our team at NIU went on to play in the California Bowl in Fresno, the most important game of my career up to that point. The last bowl game for NIU had been the Mineral Water Bowl in 1965, when they lost to North Dakota, and it had been twenty years since NIU had won a bowl game.

“You were so proud of your team, and you knew that you were going to win this game and make our university proud,” she said.

Joan came out with my parents to be by my side the week of the game. If I played well and we won, she said, it could make a big difference during the upcoming NFL draft. The better I did, the earlier round I could be drafted to a good team, with more money in my contract.

“You played really well, and the team won the game,” she said.

After the game I was honored to be recognized as a member of the Mid-American Conference First Team All-Conference, which included the best players in my division—a sort of who's who on the twelve teams—and won an honorable mention for the All-American Team, its nationwide counterpart.

As happy as I was to hear all these stories, I was starting to shut down with the frustration of not remembering any of what she was describing. Joan, who had become well versed in recognizing this pattern, began summarizing the next phase of my football career.

When the season ended, she said, scouts from about fifteen NFL teams came to the university to watch me work out and had me do fitness tests to see how well I performed. Joan said she was very involved in helping me pick my agent, Jack Wirth, but she couldn't remember much about him except that he was from the Chicago area. She said we both liked him, and he seemed to know his stuff.