Memories of a normal life, reconstructed bit by bit

“SOMETIMES I see my brain as a scalded pudding, with fluky dark spots here and there through its dense layers, and small scoops missing,” writes Floyd Skloot in “In the Shadow of Memory,” a poignant memoir of his experience with virally induced brain damage. “Sometimes I see it as an eviscerated old TV console, wires all disconnected and misconnected, tubes blown, dust in the crevices.”

In 1988, at age 41, Skloot was a governmental public policy advisor, a poet and novelist and a healthy long-distance runner. On a plane trip from Oregon to Washington, D.C., he contracted a virus that targeted his brain, destroying many of his cognitive and physical abilities: He walks with a cane, his balance is completely shot and tests show that his IQ has plummeted.

He was, as he puts it, “demented overnight,” suddenly unable to perform the simplest tasks. Familiar phone numbers were forgotten; he erased computer files he meant to save. He got lost walking the few blocks to the cafe he frequented, and at a snack bar he couldn’t remember how to operate the vending machine. Eventually, “[n]othing made sense anymore. I was lost in time and space, it seemed; I felt myself, my mind, to be incoherent and my world to be in fragments.”

About 1.5 million Americans suffer traumatic brain injury every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, a total that omits those whose brains are damaged by disease. Skloot’s gemlike essays strive to make sense of this experience, and he notes the difficulty in composing them:

“This essay has taken me eleven months to complete, in sittings of fifteen minutes or so. Built of fragments shaped after the pieces were examined, its errors of spelling and of word choice and logic ferreted out with the help of my wife or daughter or computer’s spell-checker. It may look to a reader like the product of someone a lot less damaged than I claim to be. But it’s not.”

Written over 13 years, the essays describe learning to live with the damage and making peace with a brain that will never again work as it once did. He writes of his struggle for physical balance (“After the first couple of times watching our trees dance in the wind caused me to fall over, I learned to savor the vivid sound of wind heard with my eyes averted”) and of his ability to handle only one simple task at a time.

Everyday words elude him; he asks for the “tracks” to be passed to him at dinner when he wants the gravy. “Was it because gravy sounds like grooves, which led to tracks, or because my tendency to spill gravy leaves tracks on my clothes?” he wonders. When reading a book or watching a movie, he loses the earlier parts of the narrative thread. “[F]oreshadowing is wasted on me,” he confides. The sight of his cat or the sound of a bird’s call will not only make him lose his train of thought, it will likely end his ability to write for the day.

The absurdness of his situation -- conducting research and striving to write about the very damage that has made accomplishing such tasks nearly impossible -- makes the work that much more impressive and courageous. “I realize it is ironic to forget details of a chapter on amnesia,” he tells of the research process, “but at the time the humor escaped me.” But other, more positive alterations have occurred. He’s become a softer person, more attuned to the rhythms of daily life. “Forced out of the mind, forced away from my customary cerebral mode of encounter, I have found myself dwelling more in the wilder realms of sense and emotion,” he recounts. “I have been resouled.”

Skloot’s essays also consider the metaphysical aspects of memory -- how we define ourselves by what we remember. In the book’s middle section, he takes readers back to his Brooklyn childhood with his colorful but verbally and physically abusive mother, his chicken-butcher father and his older brother to create the vivid story of the family who created him. The final section, “A Measure of Acceptance,” masterfully weaves all the stories into a cohesive whole, examining how family and memory (and, at times, the lack of memory) become the ingredients from which we create our self-perceptions.

Never self-indulgent, the book is a clear-eyed investigation into our powers of recall, especially as they relate to painful familial pasts, and a look at how we never stop trying to make something transcendent of our disturbing memories. He writes, for example, of hoping to forge a new and more loving relationship with his mother when age-induced dementia alters her personality from the ill-tempered, difficult woman he’d known. “After all, my mother is now sweet and mellow,” he reflects. The very condition that makes her genial, though, he soon comes to see, also prevents the connection he so optimistically seeks. “Her love for me seems honest and undiluted -- at last -- but it has no substance,” he realizes. “She does not in fact know who I am or remember anything about me.”

With this searing honesty, Skloot’s essays add up to a profoundly moving tale of emotion triumphing over the analytical, of the importance of accepting family shortcomings rather than trying to rewrite the past. The world Skloot delineates is one in which brain damage, like troubled family histories, offers backhanded kinds of blessings -- blessings he nonetheless celebrates with refreshing candor.