The Vow: The True Events That Inspired the Movie (12 page)

Relaxing in Arizona at the Miraval Resort, compliments of
The Leeza Show.

Enjoying God’s great miracle—a new life together.

Our wedding rings. Special to me (Kim) is my wedding band. Made from the first wedding ring and a new ring Krickett gave me for the second wedding. The two were melted and shaped into one that has the look of both.

Kim and Krickitt arm and arm in the back yard.

Hanging out in the back with the kids, Danny and LeeAnn.

Having some yogurt at the local Aspen Leaf Yogurt Shop. The family favorite is Cake Batter!

A stroll along the local Riverwalk in Farmington, New Mexico. Still in love and always will be!

LeeAnn, Dad, Mom, and Danny sitting on the sandstone out the back gate of our home.

Hanging out at the Riverwalk in our hometown of Farmington.

The family, football, and the pups Muffin, Joey, Sugar, and Fritzi.

5

MOVING ALONG

W
hen Krickitt made her declaration of singleness in such a matter-of-fact way, it felt like someone had thrust a knife deeply into my chest. I looked into her eyes, praying for even the slightest hint that she recognized me. She looked back at me with the gaze of a stranger. Until that point I had hope that my wife, at some level, knew I was her husband. After all, I had been with her for most of her waking moments since the accident. She recognized me when I walked through the door, and she answered back when I spoke to her. But I realized she did the same to the medical personnel. To my wife, I was just another person who was helping her recover. It finally hit me that she had absolutely no idea who I was. I staggered out of Krickitt’s room and into the hall, hammering the wall with my fist. Even the searing pain in my broken hand—still in a soft cast—couldn’t penetrate my rage.

As fierce as my reaction was, it quickly faded. Spent and defeated, I soon walked back into Krickitt’s room and stood beside her bed. She looked up at me without anger or curiosity. She just seemed to be waiting for me to speak to her as I always did. I opened my mouth but found I had nothing to say.

Krickitt’s neuropsychologist at Barrow, Dr. Kevin Obrien, explained Krickitt’s diagnosis to me in the most encouraging way he could. He told me that the accident actually had caused two kinds of amnesia. The first, post-traumatic amnesia, was a temporary confusion about where she was and what was going on around her. For Krickitt, this type of amnesia was already wearing away, and it would soon disappear completely.

The second type of amnesia was more distressing, at least for me. Krickitt also had retrograde amnesia, a permanent loss of short-term memory. We already knew she had regained her memory of people and events from the distant past. She remembered her parents, brother, and sister-in-law. She remembered her old roommate Lisa. She even remembered her old boyfriend Todd, which didn’t bring me great joy. But she could remember nothing from the previous year and a half. And what had happened during those months? My wife and I had met, dated, gotten engaged, gotten married, had our honeymoon in Hawaii, and started our life together in Las Vegas. She didn’t remember any of it; she didn’t even remember anything about the accident.

Over the next few days I prayed a lot about the future—
our
future. Ever since I had watched the EMTs work on Krickitt while she was still strapped upside down in our car, my whole existence had been focused on getting her back. Miraculously, God had saved her life, and I had been impatient to pick up where we left off and build a future together. But that assumed we would be building on a shared past. Suddenly the past was gone. Now I had no idea when, if ever, my wife’s memory would return. Yet I knew that no matter what happened, I had made a vow not just before our friends and family, but also before God. I was Krickitt’s husband, for better or for worse. And this was just about the worst I could imagine.

As I lay awake each night praying and thinking about how I was going to adapt to this new life, I would be afraid one minute, mad the next, and everlastingly confused. All kinds of questions flew through my mind.
What will life be like from now on? What kind of person will Krickitt turn out to be? Will she always be different? Is the young woman I married still in there, or is she gone for good? When will we know that her recovery has stopped—that she has improved as much as she is going to?
It was all I thought about. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t relax, and I couldn’t get rid of the stress. Though Krickitt still had a chance to recover part of her lost memory, the doctors had told me there were some things she would never remember. The most agonizing question of all was:
Would one of those things be me?
I quickly put that thought from my mind. I couldn’t bear to contemplate the fact that my wife might never remember me.