What’s it like when the person you love most gets amnesia and can’t remember you. Joan Bolzan on how she faced the unthinkable hurdle.

by Joan Bolzan

Imagine, in an instant, your spouse of nearly 25 years doesn’t know you anymore. All the moments you shared together—gone. On Dec. 17, 2008, it happened to me. My husband, Scott, after slipping and falling at his office building at approximately 7 a.m., woke up with profound retrograde amnesia. In that simple accident, he lost all 46 years of his memory, including world history, the kids, his family, and me. Our marriage, our family, our life, deleted.

Joan Bolzan with her husband, Scott., Courtesy of Joan Bozlan

I was the director of marketing for my husband’s business, a private-jet management company; the mother of a son, Grant, 19, and a daughter, Taylor, 16. We lived in Gilbert, Ariz. Scott was a 46-year-old former NFL player, professional pilot, and owner of his company Legendary Jets. And suddenly, he was a stranger, a man who looked at me blankly from his hospital bed, no flicker of recognition.

With that, I became a caretaker, a medical researcher on his condition, the president of the family business, and the head of the household, all at once. I barely had time to think about whether this was forever. When we left the hospital, the doctors thought his memory would return within a few weeks, at most. So in those early days, I just tried to get through each day.

While Scott spent most of the day nursing an intense headache, I spent time putting out fires that were erupting in the business without the leader at the helm. I was fielding sales calls, trying to find passwords and other information to help the bookkeeper, going through mounds of papers. I was keeping things quiet from his competitors so business was not lost to them with news of Scott’s brain injury, which I was told would quickly resolve, and life would return to business as usual.

When Scott had breaks in the pain, we would watch TV. Just one commercial would bring up a never-ending list of questions for Scott. He would ask things like: Why are people dressed in coats and it looks cold, when we are in light clothing and there is no snow? Why do people sound and dress different then we do? How big is Arizona? How big is The United States? The world? Many times these questions would lead us to family pictures that would give some background into the world we live in and the things we had experienced together. I would show Scott on the globe that we grew up in Illinois, outside of Chicago. I would explain that there are different climates and that in Arizona, at least in Phoenix, we stayed warm and it did not snow at Christmas. To read this article in full, click here.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: While brain injury loss of memory and dementia are different, the outcomes produce similar results. Last night’s “60 Minutes” broadcast included an interview with Meryl Streep. Streep stars in a new movie about former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; Thatcher has been suffering with dementia since 2008.]