Quest and Tillie

A Note About Forgotten Memories

A number of readers insisted Quest was lying when he said he couldn't remember the actual act of having sex with Mary-Lou Dawn. He wasn't. The whole basis for Quest not remembering came from something I actually experienced and wanted to put into a story.

My mother threw me a surprise party on my sixteenth birthday, and that was a real surprise because my family didn't do birthday parties. You got presents and a homemade cake, some semi-passable singing of "Happy Birthday!" and you blew out your candles and ate your cake.

Two days later, my mom told me she was having surgery the next day to see if a lump in her breast was cancerous. At that point, I realized she'd thrown the party for me in case it was the last birthday she could celebrate with me.

On the day of her surgery, I went to school (because in my family, you needed a good reason to miss school and you soldiered on no matter what). I remember driving to school, watching the clock in my first three classes, and failing my geometry test right before lunch. (OK, full disclosure -- I wouldn't have done well regardless because...geometry.)

I remember running out of geometry, calling home, and Nana answering to tell me very gently that Mom had cancer. I remember making it to the bathroom and crying for a few minutes before pulling myself together so I could get through the rest of the school day. I remember driving home and picking up my grandmother, driving her to Beaumont Hospital, and crossing over the huge bump on Woodward Avenue (any Bob Seger fans? That Woodward Avenue). I remember parking and walking up to my mom's hospital room and my grandmother walking into her room.

I remember standing in the doorway, looking at my mother with tubes and drains and bags attached to her. Then I don't remember anything until I came home from school the next day and Mom was there, resting on the couch in the living room.

Years later, I overheard my mom commiserating with a friend on the phone about how short hospital stays were getting. When she hung up, I mentioned that they couldn't have been any shorter than her overnight stay when she had breast cancer. She looked at me like I was crazy and told me she had been in the hospital for a week.

Holy shit. I apologized for being the worst daughter in the world since I only went to see her that first day. Again, she looked at me like she didn't know what I was talking about and told me I had been to visit her, along with my grandmother, every single day.

I had lost a week of my life. It was a complete blank. I remembered immediately before, with startling precision, and the right after, still able to recall that overwhelming relief I felt when I walked into my house and saw Mom. I went over and over that first trip to the hospital in my mind and realized all the details were still there so clearly...until they abruptly ended right after I saw her in her hospital bed. My memories stopped in the doorway of that room and didn't resume until she was home.

That missing time always bothered me, and many years later, I thought it might be interesting if that blanking out happened in a story and in that way, Quest and Tillie came about. In fact, Chapter 4 of Quest and Tillie was my experience put into words (in an entirely different way), of remembering each detail before and after vividly, but the during being erased from the mind. Quest wasn't lying about not remembering the during, but he remembered the before and after with the same clarity I had.

I've never been able to recall that lost week, no matter how many times I tried. It's still a blank. But the most important part of the story -- the very best part -- was that Mom was a 27 year survivor. Her cancer never came back.

That part, I do remember.