The Vow: The True Events That Inspired the Movie (17 page)

In the end, I made the painful decision to resign from my position as baseball coach. At that point I wasn’t able to focus on both my job and my wife to the extent they needed, and my commitment to Krickitt was my top priority. After all, I had vowed to be there for her for life, and if it was going to work I knew what had to be done. I hadn’t made that promise to my team, but still I felt I let those boys down even though I knew I had no choice.

I knew I made the right decision, and I set out to focus on my new job: taking care of Krickitt. Unfortunately, one of my first efforts to spend some quality time with her backfired. The weekend after I resigned from Highlands, the two of us went to a Cowboys baseball game and watched from the bleachers. During the game a bench-clearing fight broke out on the field. The sight of it confused Krickitt and upset her. It didn’t help matters any that the coach of the opposing team told me in no uncertain terms that if I had been on the field doing my job like I should have been, the fight never would have happened. Nevertheless, even though others obviously questioned my decision, I knew it was the right one for me and for Krickitt.

By the time summer rolled around, Krickitt had recovered enough to start working part-time again as an exercise technician at the same hospital fitness center where she’d worked before the accident. This was a great move, because it gave her the opportunity to be in charge of something again and have something in her life that she felt she had some control over. As she took this step, I could see traces of the old Krickitt. She still had her sense of responsibility—she was always prepared for the job and was always on time. It was so good to see my wife amongst the backdrop of her old life, surrounded by fitness equipment, weight machines, and free weights. I was proud of how far she’d come.

At the same time Krickitt was becoming more self-sufficient, our relationship was in a death spiral. Just when I thought our home life couldn’t be more erratic and stressful, Krickitt’s flashes of hatred toward me got more brutal than ever.

One of my most vivid memories of that time was when we were at a car wash, of all places. While we were standing at the exit waiting for the car to appear, we got into an argument. In only a few seconds we were screaming at each other. Soon Krickitt threw her water bottle at me, and the next thing I knew she was striding down the sidewalk away from me. I still couldn’t move very fast, but it only took a couple of minutes for me to catch up with her in a fast-food restaurant, where I again found her crying and talking to her mom on the phone.

On another particularly bad day we were in the middle of a rather animated disagreement when she picked a fork up off the table behind her, whirled around, and threw it. It stuck in the wall beside me.

“Leave me alone! I hate you!” If I had heard those words once, I’d heard them a thousand times, but this time it wasn’t Krickitt’s words I was worried about, it was her actions.

“Krickitt, get a grip!” I typically tried to respond to her anger calmly, but this time I was furious. If she hadn’t taken such bad aim, that fork would have sunk into me instead of the wall.

“Stop treating me like a child!”

“Stop acting like one!”

My wife’s eyes were filled with hatred. “Maybe I should just slit my wrist.”

That was the last straw. “There’s a knife in the kitchen,” I informed her, pointing in that direction.

“You think I’m kidding, don’t you? Maybe I’ll hang myself.”

“There’s a rope in the truck.”

Krickitt bolted outside and slammed the door shut behind her. In the few seconds it took me to yank it back open she had disappeared. I found her, exhausted and crying, hiding behind a car in an apartment parking lot down the street.

I helped her back inside and we sat down in the living room. There was a long silence.

“I miss the old Krickitt,” I said at last.

“I miss her too,” she answered. I wondered if she even knew who the old Krickitt was.

What I later came to realize is that Krickitt was just as frustrated as I was, she just didn’t always have the capability to show it in a rational manner. She knew she wasn’t the woman she had once been, and she wanted our marriage to work. I later read in her journal, “Dear Lord, I thank you so much for being by my side and being so faithful to me. I need you now, and daily. I can see that I
cannot
do this on my own strength, but I need you to carry me and help me through each and every day. I pray for [our] marriage. Please be the center of it and help us to treat one another with respect and a lot of love. . . . Help me to return to the parts of Krickitt you liked. Please help me and forgive me with all my frustrations.”

It was only a matter of time before well-meaning people started asking me—indirectly but unmistakably—if I would ever consider divorce as an option. “At some point you might just have to let this go,” they would say. A social worker told me that when a married person has a debilitating head injury, the odds of divorce are around 80 to 90 percent. Someone pointed out that taking that route would release me from my responsibility for Krickitt’s medical bills. It would be an easy way out of a lot of problems.

I had a simple answer for anyone who suggested divorce: “No. It will never happen.” It simply was not an option for either of us. It didn’t matter whether Krickitt remembered me or not, whether it took every penny I had to take care of her, or even whether we ultimately lived together or apart. The simple truth was that I couldn’t see myself going through life without the woman I loved—the woman I had vowed to protect through times of challenge and need.

But at the same time I knew we couldn’t continue down the path we were on. The more Krickitt recovered physically the worse I felt, because at the same time she was getting well, we were growing more distant emotionally.

For several months I had been battling an idea that I hadn’t wanted to share with anyone. Since Krickitt didn’t remember me, I wondered whether my responsibility was really to re-establish our household as husband and wife the way it once was. After all, that might never happen. Instead, I was believing more and more that my job as a husband who truly, selflessly loved his wife might be to help restore her independence to the point where she could live the rest of her life on her own if that’s what it took to bring her peace.

7

SECOND CHANCES

A
year and a half after our wreck, I had finally resigned myself to the fact that my wife would never be the same person she had been before the accident. There were still moments when I would get tantalizing glimpses of the woman I had married that returned me for a split second to the way things had been. But at the same time those glimpses were also heart-piercing reminders of the life I had lost and was never going to get back.

Krickitt never recovered her memory of our meeting, engagement, marriage, honeymoon, or anything of our life together before the accident. In fact, it turned out that for more than a year she was not even always aware that she had a period of unrecovered memory. She was extremely confused during that time because she didn’t always know who I was or why I was there, yet for most of that time she was living with me as my wife.

Imagine what that must have been like for her. The movie
50 First Dates
was still a decade away from being released, but anyone who has now seen the movie can get a glimpse of what life was like for Krickitt some days. Thankfully, unlike the woman in the movie, Krickitt eventually did get to the point where she always remembered that she couldn’t remember everything about her life.

During that time, Krickitt was given constant reminders from friends and family that she was indeed married to me, and she watched the video of our wedding and looked at our honeymoon pictures a hundred times. She was slowly realizing that life wasn’t a bad dream she would eventually wake up from. What she was experiencing was the new reality. And as much as she rejected me at times when she couldn’t remember that there were things she couldn’t remember, she always had a sense that I was there as her protector and companion. She knew there was something special about me because I went out of my way to be with her and help her. “I figure if I fell in love with this guy before,” she said, “I could do it again.”

I continued to be amazed that her spiritual awareness and trust in God seemed miraculously intact. As her brother, Jamey, had said early in her recovery, she had a rock solid “core of Christianity” that even this terrible experience couldn’t damage. Could that faith be combined somehow with her faith in our marriage to close the gap between us or at least keep it from getting any wider? Even though she couldn’t remember our wedding, would her faith compel her to keep the vows she had made to me?

One big mystery for me was still what Krickitt was thinking from one minute to the next. Her mood swings were so wide and unpredictable. Frankly, our whole relationship was unpredictable. I didn’t know what Krickitt was like any more, and I didn’t know whether her true self—whatever that was—was represented in her actions, or whether there was a disconnect between what she thought and what she did. I wondered if maybe in her head she knew how to behave, how to interact with me, how to control her anger, and how to be affectionate and forgiving, but she couldn’t put her knowledge into practice because of her injury. Or maybe she didn’t know any of those things at all. Maybe she was truly communicating what she thought and felt inside. Maybe this
was
the new Krickitt.

As if the tension in our relationship wasn’t enough, we were still getting relentless calls from collection agencies and were dealing with the ongoing legal battle to settle with our auto insurance company. Before our accident, I had never had a conversation with a bill collector. I had only ever written one bad check, and that was only because I had put a deposit into the wrong account by mistake. I was very responsible with my finances, and I had always paid my insurance premiums specifically to avoid a financial meltdown in the unlikely event of a serious accident. Now the meltdown had happened, in spite of my good intentions and responsible actions, and we were getting nowhere with the insurance company that I faithfully paid every month.

Some days the problems were overwhelming, sweeping over me in waves. I was drowning in stress and confusion and anger. I couldn’t sleep, I’d had to give up my dream job, and I didn’t know how to be a husband to my wife any more. On other days life seemed less black and hopeless. The one thing I could hold onto was our faith in God. For all her random behavior, I know Krickitt had faith that God was in control, as did I. In the depths of our nastiest shouting matches, we were still connected by that thread of faith.