by Su Meck
The next day was Sunday, and as I was in the shower getting ready for church, Jim came into the bathroom and said, “You’re going to want to take a look at the front page of the Washington Post when you finish your shower.” My first thought was that the United States had endured another terrorist attack. Imagine my surprise when I squinted to read the headlines. I grabbed my glasses and looked again. There I was on the front page of the Washington Post! Holy shit! Dan had written the most amazing, heartfelt piece, and I was instantly in love with the man and his ability to make words sound so perfectly put together.
Dan’s Washington Post article led to a BBC interview, a radio interview with Elliot in the Morning on DC101, and a spot on the Today show. All of that led me to Peter Steinberg, a literary agent in NYC, who helped Dan and me write up a proposal for this very book. Peter then helped me through what seemed like a million meetings with different publishing houses in New York to see what kind of interest there might be about a story such as mine. From Dan’s article to the signing with Peter and everything in between—it all happened in a matter of a few weeks.
It was a whirlwind of feverish activity, compounded by the fact that our house was on the market and we would be moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, that summer in order for me to start at Smith College in September. Life is never dull!
23
Wish You Were Here
—Pink Floyd
Monday, June 20, was just another hot and humid day in a long string of hot and humid days in Gaithersburg, Maryland, during the summer of 2011. I slept in a bit that morning, and by the time I finally walked Lucy and Linus, the summer swelter had surged past ninety degrees. After just half an hour, and only half of our regular walk, the dogs and I had definitely had enough, so we turned around and trudged home. While Linus chomped away on “ice treats” on the cool floor, I got myself a huge tumbler of ice water and sat down at our kitchen table to check my e-mail on our Mac laptop. Jim was working out of the house by this time, preparing for our move to Massachusetts later in the summer, and had come up from his basement office to grab an early lunch.
As a result of all the media attention my story had gotten, I had been flooded with e-mails and Facebook friend requests from far and wide. There were a few weirdos, but for the most part people simply wanted to offer their support and share with me their own stories of personal struggles. I often felt humbled as I read what people wrote, and I tried my best to respond to everything that came to me. On this particular morning, as I scanned a dozen or so new friend requests, one in particular caught my eye. It came from a “Neal Moore.” The name sounded vaguely familiar, so I clicked on it, but there was no picture and not much information on his rather anonymous Facebook page. I immediately thought weirdo, but at the same time I was certain I had heard the name before. So I asked Jim if the name “Neal Moore” meant anything to him.
“Sure,” Jim said. “He was your high school boyfriend, the guy you were seriously dating when I met you.” At Jim’s words, I suddenly recalled Neal’s name occasionally coming up when Jim tried to tell me about my life—our lives, really—before he and I had met. I also vaguely remembered my parents talking about a Neal in some remote conversations. And then, yes, I was sure I had heard some mention of a former serious boyfriend by the few high school and college friends with whom I had reconnected over the years. I told Jim that Neal had contacted me on Facebook, and I asked if he would have a problem with my accepting his friend request. Jim just laughed and said, “No . . . Why would I?”
What happens when most other people get Facebook messages from long-lost boyfriends or girlfriends? Maybe there is a sudden flood of various emotions? A rush of warm, sweet, familiar pain in the chest? Possibly a surge of significant memories—vivid images of long, sweet kisses in doorways, of hushed late-night conversations on the telephone, of bodies coming together lovingly under crisp sheets? Or maybe instead there are overwhelmingly less favorable emotions: jealousy, resentment, anxiety, or insecurity.
I, of course, didn’t get any of those feelings, sensations, or emotions, good or bad. Neal wasn’t an actual, flesh-and-blood memory to me. He was simply another character in another set of stories I had been told about. I had absolutely no real recollections of Neal, no emotional investment in our earlier relationship whatsoever. Was this “Neal Moore” my first real love? Friends and family assured me that he was, but what did that matter, if all trace of that love had been wiped from my memory? But then I began to wonder. There had been a point when I hadn’t remembered my parents or my brothers and sisters. There had been a point when I had not had any vivid images of my kids. There had been a time when I had no real feelings for my husband. And yet the expectation, and eventually the reality, was that I loved all of these people. Was this really any different? Neal and I had loved each other passionately in some kind of previous life. That was a fact. And the facts kept coming.
Already, fate had delivered me two previous chances to reunite with Neal, and I had failed to follow through either time. The first chance was a decade ago, when I was visiting my friend Kathy in Pennsylvania, near where my family once lived. “We got in the car and went for a ride,” Kathy recalls. “You wanted to see the house you grew up in, in Chesterbrook. We went and looked at your house, but you had no recollection of it. Over the course of our conversations about the good ol’ days, I said, ‘You know, maybe Neal is in the phone book.’ ” I had no particular reaction to that thought. Entirely on her own initiative, Kathy dug out a phone book, pawed through it, and found a listing for Neal’s family in Phoenixville, the suburb where Kathy, not I, remembered his family had lived. She wrote down the number on a sheet of paper and handed it to me; she seemed excited at the prospect that I might call him. I didn’t. I don’t know why. Maybe I wasn’t ready yet. I kept that piece of paper with his family’s phone number on it stashed at the bottom of my underwear drawer.
The second chance came years later, when I was in Pennsylvania again, this time on a college-looking trip with Kassidy. On this trip, I met up with an old friend from my high school marching-band drum line, a man named Lenny Brown. Lenny had friended me on Facebook months before, and I messaged him that I was going to be in Wayne for a day or two with my daughter, and did he and his wife want to meet to catch up? Lenny and Mary met us at a restaurant in King of Prussia. We talked, and Neal’s name came up again. When I returned home, I mentioned Neal to Jim. Jim remembers saying, “Well, Su, we can probably find him if you want. And we got so far as a phone number and e-mail address. And I thought you had initiated it then.” I hadn’t. I don’t know why. I guess I still wasn’t ready. But I printed the records from the computer and kept that information in the same drawer.
But this situation was different: This time, Neal had contacted me.
I really had no idea what I was starting when I wrote my first Facebook message to Neal. Hell, I didn’t even know for sure if this was the same Neal Moore I had dated almost thirty years earlier. Neal Moore. It’s not such an unusual name; and of course I kept thinking the author of this friend request, with his anonymous Facebook page, might be nothing but another weirdo.
Late in the morning of June 20, I wrote: “Are you the Neal Moore that I have heard about for so many years? If so, I would love to talk to you at some point and have you fill in some gaps.” That was a generic enough reply, I thought. There was a lot I didn’t know about my time in high school. The tales I always heard about my school years before going to college at Ohio Wesleyan were full of wild pranks, drunken incidents, long stretches of dark emotional moods, and constant battles with my parents. Certainly nothing very positive was ever related to me. Would Neal, if he was the Neal of my youth, just have more of the same?
I held my breath.
A reply came two days later: “I don’t know what you’ve been told or not told about me, but to answer your question in a word, yes. I can’t believe it’s really you!” I was about to learn a lot more about Ne
al, and a lot more about myself. Remember, at the moment I made contact with Neal, the total sum of my knowledge of my three-year relationship with this man would have fit into this one single paragraph.
A week earlier, Jim and I and my amnesia had all been guests on NBC’s Today show. An old friend of Neal’s watched the show, heard my story, and noted the odd spelling of my name. Neal recalls: “She e-mailed me and said, ‘Did you watch the Today show this morning?’ And I said, ‘I never watch the Today show.’ And she said, ‘Well, you might be interested in this, because I think I saw Su as a guest.’ And I said, ‘It can’t be, because Su died in a car accident twenty years ago.’ ”
Neal and I had dated for three years. Then the relationship had mysteriously evaporated. Then I had died—or so Neal thought. Losing me had pushed Neal into a sort of hibernation. For the next few years, he threw himself into work and study, moving out of his parents’ home and living in solitude, avoiding old friends and new girlfriends. His parents feared for his health. It was the first time since the start of high school that Neal wasn’t attached.
From Neal’s perspective, our relationship had lacked a proper ending. When I left for college, we were all but engaged. We had a wedding date, if only in our own minds. And then Neal had visited me at college and found me distant and kind of standoffish with him. When I returned home after just one trimester for winter break, I was in an unwavering, unreadable sulk.
“Christmas break we were together,” Neal recalls. “It was initially tearful. You were upset. I was upset.” It was on that visit, apparently, that I told Neal about Jim. “You just put it out there as somebody you met at school, and you were dating him there, but when you were with me, you wanted to be with me.” After the break, I went back to school and Neal recalls, “We continued on like nothing had happened. During the following summer when you were back home and working at Picket Post Swim and Tennis Club, I thought everything was back to normal with us. Because it was. And then your letters stopped coming abruptly during the end of your second year at school.”
The following year, 1985, Neal ran into one of my friends. She told him a wrenching story: “You were on a highway near Delaware, Ohio. You were coming home from a weekend, or something like that. You were passing a tractor trailer, and you came out around it, and it was a head-on collision. I remember sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed in their bedroom and telling them.” My parents had moved to Houston, Texas, by the time Neal heard about this, so he had no real way to check the story out. In those pre-Internet eighties, he could find no obituary, no record of my passing. And of course by then I was no longer Su Miller. I had married Jim in May of 1985, and was now Su Meck.
Back in the present, Neal’s friend persisted: “The name is Su Meck, but it’s S-U, like Su used to spell it, and this woman looks just like Su, only older.” Neal sat in his office at work that morning and searched online for the Today show video. He found it and clicked on the link.
Neal recalls: “A woman I work with came into my office and said, ‘What’s the matter? You’re white.’ And she sat and watched it with me, and she said, ‘Is that the girl you talked about?’ Anybody who knows me knows about Su. And she said, ‘Well, she doesn’t look dead.’ And pretty soon all the women in my office were watching this recording with me. And they were all like, ‘Contact her, contact her!’ And I didn’t know how to contact you.”
Neal found me on Google first. Then he opened a Facebook account and dispatched his first friend request on June 20, 2011.
After getting past the initial surprise that I was indeed the long-lost, ex-dead girlfriend, Neal and I fell into a comfortable Facebook relationship, swapping stories about our current family situations, kids, spouses, careers, music, and hobbies in an effort to become reacquainted. Neal told me he was married with two children. He and his family were living near his childhood home outside Philadelphia, and he was working as CFO at a company that provides video on demand for hotels and resorts. I told him I was married with three grown children. The domestic revelations cleared the air of any potential romantic tension.
Reconnecting with anyone who knew me before my injury has always been especially tricky for me. My behavior typically follows a predictable pattern: I remain cheerful but noncommittal as I unconsciously work constantly to figure out what the expectations in this new relationship might be. Then, also unintentionally, I labor to mold myself into whatever person I can be to fulfill those expectations and make the other person “happy.” This is never entirely fair to me or to the person I am meeting. I know that. But I still do it, and I don’t even realize what it is I’m doing until I stop and think about it much, much later.
With Neal, I made an effort almost immediately to direct our conversations into the past. I wanted to hear how we first met, if we had known each other before dating, if he had graduated from Conestoga High School, how long we dated, what kind of stuff we did together. I had nothing but questions for this poor man. In my first messages to him, I downplayed the shock of rediscovering such a major character from my long-lost past. But inside I was jumping for joy! Here was a person who just might be able to fill in countless gaps from that time and answer innumerable questions. Neal had absolutely no reason to lie and no motive to try to protect me. I got the feeling almost instantly from him that if I asked him a question, he would be most liable to answer me straight, without any spin. Neal Moore could conceivably be a terrific source of valuable information for me!
Neal told me about my car accident. I replied with a smiley face, “I was not killed in a car crash . . . just hit with a ceiling fan.” Incidentally, I found out when writing this book that Jim and I were in fact in a car accident on our way to Cuyahoga Falls for a weekend family gathering late in the fall of my sophomore year. Jim had invited me just to get off campus for the weekend. During that accident, my head had hit the windshield of Jim’s Malibu, and I had been taken to the emergency room. Jim’s car was smunched, and I had a fairly serious concussion, but I certainly hadn’t died.
Then Neal began to fill in the many details and exact particulars of our long-ago romance. He was a projectionist at the cinema and a teller at a bank; I was a lifeguard at the swim and tennis club in my family’s neighborhood of Chesterbrook. He was older and had graduated from Phoenixville High School but he had agreed to take me to my Conestoga homecoming dances and proms. We spent summer days, when we weren’t working, at his family’s pool. I would write him little notes and decorate them with hearts, stars, and doodles. I told Neal that sounded so “girlie.” No, he said, I was more the “romantic tomboy.” He said he had a box filled with graduation pictures, prom pictures, and letters I’d written him, but all of it had been destroyed four months earlier in a basement flood. Very bad timing.
We traded our first messages on the morning of June 22. By that same afternoon, we were already joking around and feeling remarkably comfortable with each other. Neal declared, “I’m always here for you!” I wrote, “I don’t know if it would ever happen, but it would be nice to meet you someday :)” Neal replied, “You already have met me, but perhaps a reunion one day would be nice.”
That night, I asked my parents about Neal. My mother said, “Oh, that Neal Moore! He really straightened you out!” She recalled that I was “so much better behaved” after we started dating, and that I would often listen to Neal when I wouldn’t listen to them or to anyone else, even if he and my parents were telling me the same thing. Mom then recounted a story from the end of my senior year as an example. Apparently, I didn’t want to go to the Conestoga High School baccalaureate service, undoubtedly because I thought I was way too cool for something as stupid as that. My parents were insisting that I go, but I kept refusing. (Most likely I was refusing simply because they were insisting.) According to Mom, Neal came in and announced that if I didn’t go to baccalaureate, he wouldn’t take me to the senior prom. He told me I would regret it later if I didn’t participate in all of the senior events
with the rest of my graduating class. He even offered to go to the service with my parents and me. (For some reason my mom asked me if Neal still had his Jeep. Really, Mom? I doubt he had the same Jeep after thirty years.)
Dad mentioned that he thought he could dig up some slides of the two of us, if I was interested. I was very interested, particularly since Neal had lost all of his pictures, as well as all the letters and all the other paraphernalia from the “Su and Neal” years. The only items he still had were a pencil portrait that he had drawn of me in his sketchbook—from my senior portrait, because I would never sit still long enough to be sketched; an Ohio Wesleyan sweatshirt; the Cabbage Patch Kid I had presented him at Christmas one year, which we had playfully named Arthur Miller-Moore; and a few mix tapes hand-lettered by the teenage me.
For me, our Facebook reunion meant the recovery of another lost chapter from a forgotten life. For Neal, my very existence set off a sort of existential time bomb. “I didn’t know how to feel,” he recalls. “I had put it in my mind that you’d been gone all these years, and all of a sudden you’re here again. It tore me apart, to be honest.”
Me and Neal Moore together at Christmas after my first semester at Ohio Wesleyan. For Christmas I gave Neal a Cabbage Patch Kids doll that we named Arthur Miller-Moore because we had seen the movie Arthur on our first date.
Neal’s years with me had been “one of the happiest times in my life,” he recalls. “We saw each other or at least talked to each other on the phone every day of our lives from the day we met. I had had many girlfriends in high school, but what you and I had didn’t even compare to that.”
I was needy, I was directionless, I was out of control, and Neal was my compass. He remembers me as the Jan Brady of the Miller household: “You were one of the ones in the middle. I won’t say that you were put aside or neglected—your parents would never have done that—but you felt that way. And I gave you the attention you craved. You could have had any guy in school. You had a lot of male friends. But you never attached to anybody. You were one of the guys. You were a tomboy. That’s what attracted me to you, because you weren’t the same kind or type of person I was used to dating, girlie girls who were boring. We used to go out to Valley Forge Park and get dirty and sweaty while hiking.” Our favorite bands were the Who, Pink Floyd, and Queen. Our favorite Who song, Neal remembers, was “Bargain,” from their 1971 album Who’s Next. With Queen it was “You’re My Best Friend” and “Fat Bottomed Girls.” And with Pink Floyd, probably the title track from Wish You Were Here. Neal told me I wrote Pink Floyd and Neal Moore all over my sneakers when I was in school. Later on, he would tell me how I lost my virginity with him at Valley Forge Park. “I didn’t push it,” he recalls. “One day after we had been dating for nine months or so, you just came to me and said, ‘Let’s go have a picnic.’ We went out for a walk and a little picnic, and you just turned to me, and one thing led to another. There were no words.”
