Missing Pieces

The video accompanying this post was recorded more than a year ago.

A lot has changed since then.

I’ve gotten stronger. I’ve learned more about my stroke, my recovery, and the strange collection of things a damaged brain can leave behind. I’ve returned to work. Life has moved forward in ways that, when this video was recorded, I wasn’t entirely sure it would.

But I still have a hard time watching it.

Part of that is emotional. Watching yourself describe one of the worst moments of your life is a strange experience. There is a vulnerability in seeing that version of yourself preserved on video, especially when you know things now that he didn’t know then.

And one of the biggest things I didn’t understand yet was just how much of my life had disappeared.

When we talk about stroke damage, we tend to talk about the things we can see.

I couldn’t move the left side of my body. I had to learn to stand, walk and navigate the world again. Those were obvious. They could be measured. They could be photographed. There was a clear before and after.

Memory has been different.

It took me a long time to realize that I wasn’t simply forgetting things. There are chunks of my life that seem to be missing entirely.

My stroke happened on December 8, 2024. Yet when I try to find my last clear memory before it, I have to travel back almost two months.

I remember shopping for pumpkins with my daughter.

Then things become remarkably thin.

After I came home from the hospital, I started finding things in my office that I had apparently purchased for Christmas. I could look at them, hold them in my hands, and know that I must have bought them.

But I had absolutely no memory of doing it.

Not a fuzzy memory.

Not one that needed a little prompting.

Nothing.

There are other holes too.

Names that should be familiar aren’t. People sometimes exist in my life without the history that should accompany them.

When I returned to work, I encountered a coworker I assumed was new. At some point I discovered conversations between the two of us in Slack from the year before my stroke.

We had interacted.

I just didn’t remember them.

There is something uniquely unsettling about being presented with evidence of your own life that you cannot remember living.

A receipt, a conversation, an object sitting in your office. They become artifacts from a version of yourself you know existed because everyone and everything around you says he did.

But you can’t access him.

That has been one of the harder lessons of recovery: surviving a stroke doesn’t necessarily mean returning with every piece of yourself.

Some damage announces itself immediately.

Some waits for you to discover it.

You notice it when someone tells a story you don’t remember. When a name refuses to connect to a face. When you find something you apparently bought. When somebody talks about an experience you shared and you smile, hoping something will eventually click.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

And that is part of why this video is difficult for me to watch.

It is my stroke story, but more than a year later I understand that even my own telling of that story is incomplete.

Recovery has given me perspective that survival couldn’t.

I’ve spent the last year thinking and writing about the parts of stroke that don’t fit neatly into the traditional recovery narrative: identity, fear, fatigue, cognition, returning to work, relationships, confidence and the uncomfortable realization that surviving survival can sometimes be harder to explain than surviving the stroke itself.

The wheelchair was obvious.

The walker was obvious.

The cane was obvious.

Missing pieces of your own history aren’t.

Neither is the feeling that comes with realizing they’re gone.

I’m sharing the video now partly because I’ve reached a point where I think the discomfort of sharing it matters less than the reason for sharing it.

And particularly as a man, I’ve thought a lot about that.

Men aren’t always very good at talking about what scares us. We can talk about the physical battle. We can talk about learning to walk again. We can turn recovery into numbers, milestones and accomplishments because those things feel safe.

The more vulnerable parts are harder.

Saying that you’re scared is harder.

Saying that your brain doesn’t work exactly the way it used to is harder.

Saying that you can’t remember people you should remember is harder.

Saying that sometimes you don’t completely recognize the person you’ve become is harder.

There can be embarrassment in admitting those things. So we don’t. And when we don’t, somebody else going through the same thing can mistakenly believe they’re the only one.

That’s ultimately why I’m sharing this.

Not because I’m particularly comfortable watching it.

I’m not.

Not because this video perfectly tells my stroke story.

It doesn’t.

I’m sharing it because stroke took enough from me already.

I don’t want embarrassment to take my voice too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0HQrWZBTjw