Amnesia is a form of memory loss that impairs a person’s capacity to create, store, and recall memories. Retrograde amnesia impacts memories generated prior to the commencement of the condition. A person with retrograde amnesia caused by a severe brain injury may be unable to recall events that occurred years or even decades prior to the injury.
Retrograde amnesia is induced by injury to the brain regions responsible for memory storage. This damage may be caused by a catastrophic brain injury, a serious sickness, a seizure or stroke, or a degenerative brain disease. Depending on the underlying reason, retrograde amnesia may be transitory, permanent, or progressive.
Typically, with retrograde amnesia, memory loss relates to facts rather than abilities. For instance, a person may forget whether they own a car, what kind it is, and when they purchased it, but they will still be able to drive.
I had a strong feeling that I had lived a sensible and cohesive life in the past, but this one made no sense.
It was quite confusing. It was like a parallel universe that I could not comprehend; it was eerie, frightening, and gloomy.’
When Howell left the hospital and returned home with her partner and daughter, the question of who she had once been remained unsolved.
She states, “It’s disheartening; it’s a feeling of being disempowered, not having access to your own tale.”
Howell fled from the world, feeling adrift with nothing to tether her and certain of little but the fact that she loved her kid.
“I was expected to know how to parent this child, and I expected the same of myself, so I fumbled along,” she explains.
Howell would come to believe that she and the father of her kid were never really close, since his behavior simply made him appear more distant.
He began arriving home intoxicated in the wee hours of the morning, claiming he was on “business.” Howell realized neither of them wore a wedding band, and she could not locate any wedding photographs.
She says, “I also believe he was in denial and unable to face what was occurring medically to me.”
Prior to her amnesia, Howell claims she did not know this man well enough. She became pregnant within a few months of their introduction by mutual acquaintances.
Howell had migraines during her pregnancy, but doctors were unable to determine the cause.
Two days prior to her delivery, she experienced a stroke.
She states, “People then realized something was off.”
She was then identified with a malformation on the left side of her outer brain that, without surgery, would kill her within five years.
The couple delayed the procedure until their daughter was 11 months old, and it was successful, but the meningitis she contracted after the surgery threw her into a three-day coma.
She states, “They didn’t think I was going to make it.”
Howell’s ensuing amnesia erased her recent personal history and obliterated the majority of her memories.
She states, “For many decades, I did not recall having a kid, meeting her father, or loving him.”
As a Hungarian Jew who had survived the Holocaust, Howell’s dentist mother was content not to recall some events; she had her own issues with the past.
The author states, “I needed information, whether it was positive or negative, but she was really reticent.”
She preferred to look forward; going backward was not something she desired.
Her father, a university professor who had twice married and divorced her mother, appeared to be another distant character.
Slowly, Howell began piecing together her story by collecting memory fragments and bits of undeniable truth.
She states, “I needed to condense my life story into something I could comprehend.”
I believe I was like a detective investigating my own past since I could not locate evidence.
I was unable to locate artifacts, obtain photographs, or obtain the stories I desired from people.
Therefore, I had to dig quite deep.
Every step she took to reclaim her sense of self was arduous. Memories were typically aroused by sounds or odors.
Her return to reading began with Where the Wild Things Are and other children’s books belonging to her daughter. “It was there,” she adds of this fundamental ability. It was somewhere under there.
Childhood memories returned faster than more recent encounters.
Howell states that important memories may not necessarily return in the manner or order that one desires.
When she read an article she had written for The Sydney Morning Herald about her teenage years in the 1970s, when a group of bikies had emerged to cause mayhem in Mosman, one set of facts resurfaced.
It was everything in black and white beneath her byline: the gang raping females, wrecking houses at parties, and distributing heroin in the suburbs.
Readers who believed Howell had damaged Mosman’s reputation had sent hate mail in response to the piece. Her father was enraged by Howell’s reporting, and a bus passenger spat on her.
She believes that several regions of the brain are involved in the process of remembering. If you have a significant memory, it becomes firmly implanted.
The relationship between Howell and her spouse began to worsen. Once, he nearly lost their daughter, and a year later, he misplaced her on Bondi Beach.
She eventually left him, finding a new set of pals in the Bronte neighborhood of the eastern suburbs.
A postscript at the end of the book resolves a portion of the mystery surrounding Howell’s enigmatic lover, who, like other individuals in her memoir, is given a pseudonym.
After the pair broke up, he moved to Indonesia and got wealthy until his world collapsed and he reentered her life.
Howell has pondered the extent to which her current knowledge of the past is the result of recovered memory versus relearning.
She explains, “I wanted people to consider how much we reproduce what we’re told and how much we recall firsthand.” Is that my family telling me about this or am I telling them?
“I’ve made it my life’s mission to sift through information fragments.
I have the impression that I created my own memories since I tried so hard to retrieve them.
Howell, who received her PhD in creative writing in 2013, resides and continues to work on the New South Wales south coast.
Now 61 years old, she still suffers from migraines, but she has no plans to quit writing and is thrilled to get her book published.
She says, ‘It’s hard to believe that happened to me, yet it’s so real to me since it altered my life forever.’
“I’m happy, I’m active, I have many friends, and life is nice.”
