Breakfast with The Nanana

12.15.13

       I was geekily excited about Sunday morning brunch with The Nanana. I was really, really excited about getting to continue our friendship after Kaitlyn, and I was flat our joyous that we got to go to her house and meet her husband.

       We drove through the neighborhood where she lives and tentatively got out of the car and headed up the steps. Kenney lives in a gorgeous white two-story home, and the inside of it is everything you would expect with a nickname like "The Nanana." There were pictures of her family on the walls, and the house looked like it could have been plucked from the pages of Home and Garden. 

       She and her husband were cooking up a storm in the kitchen, and she invited us to come in and sit at her big wooden table while they finished getting everything ready. When we sat down, we started talking about our life and what all had been going on with me going back to work and adjusting to life getting back to normal. 

       Then we talked about her. She shared with us the story of how she was adopted at a young age (around 3-4 years old) by a family who had essentially been her babysitters for a year before her birth Mom gave her up to them legally. She told the story of how her birth Mom had been 14 or 15 years old when she got pregnant with Kenney, and that her birth Dad had told her birth Mom, "Don't you dare give that child my name."

        Kenney laughed when she said, "He meant his LAST name, but obviously at 15 years old my birth Mom didn't quite understand that. So my name is Kenneth Dean..." She went on to say how funny it was when she and her husband got married because on their checks there were little hearts and it said "John and Kenney (that's not really her husband's name, for privacy's sake)" and he would always get funny looks when he would write checks at the grocery store. He told her she needed to change the checks and she switched them to Looney Tunes and he said that didn't make it any better.

        Her husband had to run to work, and then it was just the three of us talking. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Kaitlyn.

        "I didn't know how much you were going to remember about me coming to the hospital that day." She admitted. "You kept falling asleep while we were talking, so I figured you wouldn't remember anything." 

        It is a very weird sensation to hear that your memory may have significant gaps in it. I read a book this summer called Brain on Fire and it is a true story about a journalist in New York that had an entire month that she had no memory of. The book is basically her investigating what the heck happened in that month, and she goes as far as to watch videos from the psych ward of herself in a period where she has no memory. It was really a fascinating book to think that you can have portions of your life that are just empty in your memory. As I've written this blog, I have continually allowed myself to go back into the places and feelings I had when the events actually happened even though I am writing them two weeks late. Its easy for me to recall the emotions and gut responses to things, and for the most part my memory is very sharp on the events that I've written about. But to be told that maybe your memory is actually full of gaps is a very strange, somewhat scary feeling.
     I thought I had a pretty vivid recollection of the events that happened in the hospital, and to hear that I may not remember bits and pieces of it shook me a little. I specifically remember Kenney saying on the Thursday she came to see us that she wasn't going to take Kaitlyn from the hospital that day.

      "The staff thought it was really weird that I wasn't going to take her. But I promised you I wouldn't, and I am trued to my word." She said. 

      "I would never have asked you about that," I told her. "Mainly because if you had lied to me then, I didn't want to know about it. So it was better for me to not ask and make you lie to me about it again if that had been the case, or for you to tell me the truth and hurt my feelings badly." 

       We finished up our breakfast and headed out to go see a movie (Alex and I love movies). Kenney's phone was ringing from the funeral home as we left, and we each got big hugs from her and promises to make plans again soon. I was overjoyed with happiness to get to keep her in our lives. I knew that we would get to be friends and I would get to love The Nanana for a long time to come.