My Life, Deleted (27 page)

“I feel like everyone is out to get me and I don't know where I am. I feel like I'm Jason Bourne,” I said, referring to the movie character CIA assassin who wakes up one day and doesn't remember who he is but is rightly convinced that people are trying to kill him.

“Babe, I'm here and you're safe in the hospital,” Joan said. “I won't let anyone do anything. I'm right here.” 

“I'm glad I got you.”

Finally the moment of truth arrived, and without the antiseizure meds, I was feeling more alert and could remember things again.

After reviewing the EEG data and videotape with a team of experts, Dr. Jason Caplan, the chief of psychiatry, told us that my seizures were
not
epileptic, meaning that my brain showed no correlated electrical activity, but were of psychological origin.

“First,” he said, “Mr. Bolzan, you're not crazy. This is not in your control, nor does anyone think you're faking it.”

My attacks and pain, he went on, were caused by my brain converting severe stressors into a sudden onset of involuntary symptoms. In other words, after all my efforts to hold things together, my body had been forced to give up the fight with my mind. Essentially, I had lost the fight with myself.

In addition to losing my memory, he said, I'd had to deal with our financial issues, Grant's drug addiction, and new career challenges, so it wasn't surprising that I would feel overwhelmed. But instead of dealing with those stressors, I'd been pushing them down, ostensibly to keep moving forward. Joan and I had always told Grant that he was his own worst enemy, and sadly, I had to admit we had something major in common after all.

“It had to come out somehow,” Caplan said.

My treatment, he said, would be to find a good therapist and learn some better coping skills. He gave us some names and said we could go home.

For the next two days I wasn't allowed to drive or be alone in the house unless I was in bed or in my big chair. It was frustrating to feel I'd regressed twenty months to being dependent on everyone again. Still very tired, I slept a lot, but as the frequency and intensity of the convulsions fell off, we both hoped this frightening episode was coming to a close.

When I woke up Saturday morning, I felt like something miraculous had happened. For the first time since before my $46,000 hospital stay (all but $2,000 of which would thankfully be covered by insurance), I had no headache. I can't even explain how relieved I felt when that gripping pain stopped. I bounced around the house with more energy than I'd had in weeks, so much so that I insisted on cutting the grass.

On Sunday I felt even better, well enough to accompany Joan to the grocery store.

“I can't believe that I don't have a headache at all,” I said, amazed.

“See what a drug-induced coma for eight days will do?” Joan joked.

“I know, this is so weird,” I said, my optimism in life renewed. “I feel great. Whatever it was, maybe it's gone and I can move forward yet again.”

At long last—we hoped, anyway—the chains of pain had been broken.

Even though I'd had an extraordinary do-over in life, this new opportunity clearly came with its own unique challenges, not to mention the reality that I was going to have to deal with its physical and emotional ramifications—along with all the other stressors of everyday life—for some time to come.

That was the rhythm of my new life: two steps forward and one step back.

I ended up going back to see Dr. Barry, the same therapist I'd visited a couple of times but stopped seeing when I'd felt I had everything under control. Luckily, he wasn't an “I told you so” kind of doctor.

We agreed that I should see him weekly for at least three months, but he cautioned that it could take years for me to internalize what I needed to learn—how to relax, to identify stressors, to listen to my body and mind, and to make necessary adjustments before I reached another crisis point. But what I most needed was to increase my self-motivation and self-worth and try to stop feeling that I was failing myself or my family.

He predicted that my biggest challenge would be to adjust to who I was now and accept that I might never know who I'd been before, to face the reality that I had experienced a death—in myself. I should grieve the old Scott, which might take years, rather than try to bring him back. And he advised that instead of obsessing about what I didn't know or understand, I should focus on all I'd achieved since the fall
without
any knowledge.

No matter how strong or in control I thought I was, clearly my mind and body both needed to get stronger, just like when I played football. And the only way that was going to happen was by “working out” with Dr. Barry.

I just had to keep telling myself that I'd managed to retain some sort of innate strength and resourcefulness that would allow me to keep pushing through the roadblocks my new life kept throwing my way.

Chapter 27

O
NE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
in late September, Joan and I drove to Tucson for a night away. We were within five miles of our hotel, leaving a restaurant after lunch, when we both checked messages on our cell phones. Seeing I had a text message from Grant that said, “I love you all very much. Good-bye,” I took this as a nice sentiment—until I heard Joan exclaim, “Oh, my God, what does this mean?” We didn't know this yet, but Grant had sent this message to all the contacts in his phone, including Taylor.

Joan called and reached a groggy, incoherent Grant, who said, “I can't take this anymore. The next shot is going to kill me,” and hung up.

In a strange technological coincidence, Joan screamed and started crying, not realizing that she had picked up a call from Taylor immediately after hanging up with Grant, and promptly hung up on our daughter. Taylor, taking Joan's reaction to mean that Grant was already dead, was in hysterics when she called me moments later.

This all happened in seconds, but by this point it was clear there was more to his text message than I'd initially thought, so I turned the car around and sped back home toward Gilbert as Taylor, Joan, and I tried to figure out where he was so the police could try to stop him.

To make a long story short, Grant had bought enough heroin to overdose, but thankfully he was too high after shooting up the first time to prepare to inject himself with the rest of his stash, which he then lost. We got the police to pick him up, to deem him a danger to himself or others, and to have him transported by ambulance to a mental health and detox facility, which held him for seventy-two hours.

On Monday Joan crashed my therapy appointment with Dr. Barry, where we spent ninety minutes discussing what to do and how to handle Grant's next announcement by phone, which was that he was moving out of the apartment he shared with three sober friends from AA. He'd decided to live on the streets and do drugs until he died.

“I don't want to hurt anyone anymore,” he told Joan.

“Grant, please don't,” Joan said. “We have lost so much—Taryn, Dad's memory, and we can't bear to lose you too, our only son. I love you so much.”

But he was not in the state of mind to hear her.

By this point my anger, which had largely stemmed from Grant's disrespectful behavior toward me and his mother, had been replaced with compassion and a better understanding of my son's condition. Once Grant's suicide threats had become real and I realized they were a call for help, I dropped the sixty-day rule. Dr. Barry had helped me, and now Joan, to accept that my son had a serious problem with depression and that he'd been self-medicating with the heroin. But until he got the mental-health help he needed and stuck with the antidepressants, he wasn't going to get any better. If he wouldn't take the help we'd been offering or seek help for himself, he was doomed.

“It will never be your fault,” Dr. Barry said.

As much as it hurt and saddened me to say this, I didn't think Grant would be with us for Christmas.

For months I'd been tormenting myself with my inability to help my son.

How can I expect to help others if I can't help Grant?

Dr. Barry said I should focus my efforts on trying to help those people who actually wanted and were willing to accept my help, but that didn't mean I didn't spend every day hoping that Grant would call to say he was tired of living like this, that he was ready now to do anything, anything at all, to get better.

Several days after the text message, Taylor and I were in her bedroom talking while she packed for the move to Los Angeles, and she told me she'd decided to cut ties with her brother. She couldn't take the pain anymore either. “What if I get another text message while I'm in LA and there's nothing I can do?” she said tearfully.

I tried to comfort her, to let her be the child and me the parent for once. She had clearly shouldered enough of this burden, and I finally felt ready to assume the parenting duties. My eighteen-year-old daughter had carried out the responsibility to the best of her ability, teaching me what she could along the way. “Let Mom and me take this over,” I told her. “This is your time to live. I apologize for you having to see me in this condition, and I certainly apologize that you have to go through this with Grant.”

“Please don't apologize for you or for Grant, Dad,” she said. “Your condition is from an accident. Grant chose his life.”

“Well, I apologize anyway because you shouldn't have had to go through all this. That's why it's important for you to go out to LA and not worry about this.”

I offered her the option to block Grant's phone number from calling or texting her, and she said she would think about it. Although she hadn't talked to him for months before the text message, she ultimately decided not to make a more permanent break because she didn't want Grant to feel she'd abandoned him.

After our conversation I realized that I had passed a major milestone. Since my accident, I'd relearned what it meant to be a good father: a role model, a teacher, and a purveyor of right and wrong. But this was really the first time that I had been able to take charge and
be
a father, speaking from the heart with confidence and not needing to parrot what I'd heard Joan or some father figure on TV say. My words seemed to comfort Taylor because she folded into my arms like a little girl, which let me know that I had effectively resumed my job as the protector I'd once been.

I felt empowered, uplifted, and valued, thrilled to be able to do this for Taylor for the first time since my accident.

Taylor had graduated from high school in May, and I'd been pleased to be surrounded by Grant and both sets of grandparents as we watched this rite of passage for the daughter to whom I had grown so close.

When I saw her walk onto the stage in her royal blue cap and gown to receive her diploma, her image reflected on the jumbo television screen, I stood up with Joan and Grant to cheer and yell out her name, tearing up at the thought that this brought her one step closer to leaving home.

“I wish I would have remembered your entire high school education, but from what I've seen the past year, I can't tell you how proud I am of you and how hard you've worked,” I told her afterward.

Taylor, who was beaming at me, responded with a hug. “Thank you,” she said.

Now, four and a half months later, the painful process of letting her go was heading into its final stretch.

On Wednesday, September 29, I woke up at 5:00
A.M.
with a knot in my stomach, knowing that this was the last morning I would see my daughter roaming around our house. There would be no more of her unique naïveté and what we called Taylorisms, the words she made up or messed up, such as saying “disposable” thumbs instead of “opposable” or that it looked “musty” outside rather than “muggy.” Selfishly, I would have loved to keep her home and spend more time with her, but I knew she had to pursue her passion and become the person she wanted to be, just as Joan and I had done at her age.

She'd really been there for me since the accident, and I'm sure the past two years had been hard on her. She'd told me about so many memories of the two of us spending time together, like the father-daughter dance we'd gone to or when I'd helped her race her four-wheeled vehicle, known as a quad, during Grant's motocross days.

I would forever miss these special moments and could only hope that I'd encouraged her and shared enough of my own life lessons before the accident so that she would have some valuable advice to carry into her adult life. If Taylor could forgive me for not remembering her first seventeen years, I could promise to help create even better memories for both of us: her first day of college, walking her down the aisle, holding the first child I imagined she would bring into this world, and who knows what else.

As we finished packing the last of her things for the road trip, she and Joan hopped into Taylor's car, and I climbed into Joan's. Anthony, who was starting college an hour or so south of Los Angeles, in Orange County, was going to follow up the next day in a U-Haul truck with his belongings and the rest of Taylor's.

My recent trips driving to and from California had proved to be some of the worst of times, faced with miles of deserted road with nothing but time to think dark, lonely thoughts. The only thing different about this trip was that Joan and Taylor would be on the road next to me.

I'd expected Taylor to sleep the whole way because I'd seen her do that on trips to the boat, so it brought me some comfort to see her, snuggling like a little girl with her pink pillow against the passenger-side window, as Joan passed me occasionally on the highway to playfully point at my sleeping beauty. When she did, I shrugged, smiled, and gestured as if to say, “What else is new?”

I wondered what my life would be like with Taylor four hundred miles away in the City of Angels, which seemed like the perfect place for her after she'd been such a guardian angel to me.

Crossing into California, we made a quick stop in Indio for fuel and snacks. I could tell that Taylor was growing increasingly nervous because when I gave her a quick hug and kiss, she looked up at me with those beautiful blue eyes as if she was thinking,
How am I going to do this without you, Dad?

I knew I needed to drive away before I started to cry, turned the car around, and told her she couldn't leave us just yet. I wanted to be strong for her, but I wasn't sure I would be able to once we got to her school the next day.

Once we arrived at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, we decided to pick up some supplies for her apartment so we wouldn't be rushed the next day. We treated our stay like a minivacation to take our minds off the daunting task that loomed ahead like a four-hundred-pound gorilla that no one wanted to acknowledge.

Taylor had been assigned to a campus-leased apartment in a mixed-use business and residential area in West Los Angeles near the Wilshire business district, six miles from the campus and the Staples Center, with some gritty urban neighborhoods in between. We circled the neighborhood, identifying grocery stores, a dry cleaner, gas stations, and banks to help her feel comfortable in her new surroundings—and so we could feel comfortable about her being there.

Given that Taylor had never been away from us for an extended period of time, I wanted to make sure we found the safest route for her to take to school, which was at 9th and South Grand Avenue. I felt like a bodyguard, telling her how to keep watch while driving or walking, always looking for ways out of trouble. “Don't walk alone; go with a friend,” I told her. “Know who's in front of you and who's behind you.”

After feeling unsafe, unsure, and afraid for the past two years, I was an expert in this area. But I felt I needed to give her even more protection, so I stopped at a martial arts store to buy her a canister of pepper spray and told her how to use it. When I said I wanted her to carry it everywhere, she obediently put it in her purse.

“We'll have to try this on Anthony to make sure it's effective,” I joked, which made us all laugh and eased the tension.

I could see by Taylor's face that she was lost in thought, and I assumed that she was feeling as I had for so long—overwhelmed by not knowing what to expect in a new environment.

“Are you sure I'm going to like it?” she asked.

I was determined to help her get through this. “At first it's difficult and overwhelming, but then this fear turns into curiosity, and then you start to embrace your new surroundings,” I said. “You're going to become comfortable.”

At the end of the day we headed back to the hotel suite, where we made up the pullout bed in the sofa for her to sleep on. I looked over at her, wrapped up in the pillows and blankets that she was so fond of, and wished that tomorrow would never come. Joan and I held each other tight in bed that night, just as upset as Taylor, wondering what our lives were going to be like without her.

Expecting a large crowd at the 10:00
A.M.
school check-in, we got up at seven o'clock so we could get there early. Of course, I was ready first and waiting on Taylor, who always took forever to get dressed and made up, but this time I sat patiently in the living room while she prettied herself.

As I carried her suitcase and she toted her purse and other belongings down to the car, I felt we were delivering her to a future filled with excitement, new friends, and a new beginning. Set free of the daily drama of my recovery and her brother's addiction issues, she could finally concentrate on herself.

It was our job now to relieve her of those burdens, along with any residual guilt or sorrow. For whatever reason, I believed the new Scott could sense exactly what she was feeling, and today, that was emptiness. Even though she would be around lots of people, I suspected that she would feel alone for some time to come, just as I had.

After several hours of registering Taylor for school, we picked up her apartment keys and started moving her in. We were all pleased to find that her two-bedroom, two-bath unit on the twelfth and top floor was spacious, with giant windows facing southeast, overlooking the downtown skyscape. I was particularly happy to see a security guard out front with an intercom and all kinds of amenities in the enormous Park La Brea complex, which was like a small city.

Joan and I spent the day fixing up the kitchen, setting up the wireless Internet, putting up a ceiling fan, and doing some minor relocation of furniture. I enjoyed feeling needed and was more than willing to do anything Taylor asked—even take out the garbage. Soon her three roommates checked in, and the apartment began to get crowded with parents and students, so we wanted to let Taylor get acquainted with them and ready herself for the first night on her own.

We stayed in town for a couple more days in case she needed us, doing our own thing during the day and meeting up with Taylor and Anthony for dinner, sightseeing, and some “needed” shopping on Melrose.