AbSense

I didn’t expect to be able to feel the empty space.

There was a lot that I knew to expect, and did expect, and since then have experienced more or less exactly as I expected. The double vision. The headaches. The fist-sized reverse-question-mark incision gradually healing into a wicked scar just above and beside my right ear. The overwhelming desire to sleep.

Even more overwhelming than usual, I mean.

But the owner’s manual didn’t say anything about actually being able to feel that absence of what they had to remove, in my case a plum-sized clump of gray matter right behind my eyes, including parts with fairly important responsibilities related to memory and emotions, all parts that had to be excavated en route to removing a benign tumor that had been causing my seizures since late 2015.

I’m glad the tumor’s gone, of course, but it’s funny to think that I might be handling the removal of the other stuff differently if I somehow still had all of it.

I have always liked to think that I’m a decent writer. Decent with words. Decent at describing things, at expressing myself, at conveying thoughts and feelings and information.

But Jesus Christ on a segway, for the life of me I cannot adequately verbalize this precise sensation of this particular absence. At first I wrote it off as illusory, a product of the power of suggestion, an imaginary sense resulting from what I knew for certain going into the surgery; the place they’d be cutting, the stuff they’d be removing, the locations of all the action.

I swear I can feel the space, though. And in feeling that small part of me that I know is gone, in feeling that absence, that departure, I feel less.

I’ve spoken this next part out loud to anyone near me willing to listen for more than the time it takes them to find something better to hear, so, my wife and dad and a couple of neighbors, but far and away my biggest fear going into the surgery was that I would come out of it with a different personality in some way. Different sense of humor or different priorities or different goals or different outlook or different reactions or different… anything.

But within a few hours of waking up, I could tell I was the same guy. Extremely weighed down with painkillers and seeing the expected double with a brand new titanium plate keeping my skull together and cruising around the hallways lying on a bed pushed by a rotating posse of medical professionals or for all I knew in my flickering drugged-out twilight my siblings or neighbors or radio call-in contest winners. But the same guy.

The absence was present, of course, but I couldn’t feel it yet. That came later, days after my hippocampus and amygdala and the tumor in question had been tossed in a medical waste barrel or burned or donated to charity or baked in a pie or whatever happens to such things.

This absence and everything about it, around it, and because of it, it’s all the strangest thing I’ve ever felt or experienced in my fortyishesque years. I said up there that I feel less, and it’s true. Physically I know I’m not, except for a couple ounces of tissue, but that tiny clump has over the weeks since I woke up hit me again and again like a ton of bricks. That clump, upon removal, in addition to the literal thing that was taken out, it became a metaphor for the intangible parts of what I can feel I’m missing now.

My memory, already the capability of my brain whose lunch money all the other capabilities had been stealing every day over the years, is noticeably worse, especially the short-term stuff. I had always been the sitcom-stereotype husband who constantly misplaced his keys and forgot what his wife told him only a few hours after the conversation, but it’s worse now. I’m confused in ways that scare me and make me feel decades older. I get confused not just about what we’re doing later, but sometimes about whether what we’re doing later has already happened, and vice-versa. As I said earlier, it’s tough to find the right adjectives for all this, so I wind up shrugging my shoulders and muttering such earthquake-inducingly profound things as, “What the hell,” and, “Boy that’s weird.”

And really, whatever I think I’m missing, rather than less it has made me more. A lot more, more of what I had always already been.

More emotional and more sensitive and more careful and more focused and more defensive and cautious and curious. There might be more mores later, but that’s what I’ve noticed so far. When I’m back at work and back on the running trail and back to my fully routinized self, I’m sure more mores will rear their heads, for better and (perhaps much, if the past circles back in all its sepia-toned glory) worse.

Look, I had a point here, honest. But that overwhelming urge to sleep is back.

So here’s to the more.