Gaithersburg woman earns college degree two decades after complete memory loss

There was a big hole at the center. Who was she? Why had she married this man, moved to this house, had these children? What thoughts lurked in the mind of the woman who lifted her baby boy from the kitchen floor that fateful day?

“I always wondered: What am I supposed to do now? What is the plan? What is the goal?” she said. “Am I supposed to be this other person who I was, or am I supposed to be this new person?”

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To complicate matters, for weeks after the injury Su could not make new memories. She would awaken each day to a house full of strangers.

It would be years before she could remember where she had parked the car at the mall. On the way home, she would circle the neighborhood, clicking the garage door opener for a hint of which address was hers. She became known around the house as the “tidy fairy,” for her habit of putting things away and then forgetting where she had put them.

“We’d have the milk out and we’d put it back in the fridge and close the fridge and . . . where did the milk go?” said Benjamin Meck, 24, the eldest of Su’s three children. Her other son, Patrick, is 23. Kassidy, the only child Su remembers from birth, is 18.

As a toddler, Benjamin developed a prodigious capacity to recall parking spaces.

Talking on the telephone was disorienting in the first few years out of the hospital, so Su and her family communicated with letters. Su wrote hers with the spelling and penmanship of a young child.

“The boys play good with Legos now so givs me a chance to rite,” she told her mother in one mailing. In another: “I hav to go to mor doctors be case fall lots to hitig head bad head ackes.”

Her mother assembled a photo album filled with images of the childhood she no longer knew. “This is your life Su,” she wrote on the first page.

For years, her life as a wife and mother was all Su knew, all she had ever known. She learned her times tables from her children and volunteered at the school library so she could hide in the stacks and read. Benjamin grew up thinking “that school was for both of us.”

Something more

Nineteen years after the accident, in 2007, Su walked into a classroom as if for the first time.

Her children were heading off to college themselves. Su yearned to be known as something other than mother and wife. It was the familiar dilemma of the stay-at-home mom, except that this mom knew nothing else.

“I didn’t really know what I was going to do,” she said. “And Montgomery College was there.”

She asked her children what to bring to class, how to take notes, how to ask questions and write papers.

Her first classes were in sociology, stress management and remedial math — at 42, Su was still multiplying by repeated addition.

Su was a slow learner — her husband can read eight pages to her one. She plodded through assignments, reading difficult passages again and again so she would remember them.

“I think she must have spent hours and hours and hours every day to try to do this,” said Michael Yassa, a brain expert at Johns Hopkins University.

She persevered in the quest for her first college degree, earning a 3.9 average and rising to chapter president of the Phi Theta Kappa honor society.

Here, surely, lay a trace of the old Su, the same stubborn resolve that had driven her youthful rebellion and, later, her obsessive study habits as a teen at Ohio Wesleyan.

“I think that part of her personality stayed with her,” said her sister Barb. “I think she needed to do this for herself.”

Su and her husband are planning a move to Massachusetts, where she will enroll at Smith College in the fall as a transfer student seeking a bachelor’s degree.

Her specialty is still the drums. She plays on a kit her husband bought for her for Christmas four years ago. It sits in the family den, framed by posters of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Who. Atop the kit is a small, stuffed Animal, the crazy Muppet drummer, another relic of a forgotten childhood.

Su went through two decades of adult life without telling anyone outside her inner circle that she had no memory of the previous two decades. She didn’t want to be pitied.

The story finally poured out one day last spring at the college, when someone in the honor society asked other members to each bring five things that meant something to them.

Su brought “Hop on Pop.”