Mind, Mood, and Memory: A Memoir of Maladies

By Marcus Byruck

Marcus Byruck grew up in a one-room flat in the Jewish ghetto of London's East End. His father sold rags from a cart and his mother died in an asylum. Bright and ambitious, he escaped poverty to work his way to Oxford University and on to a career in the burgeoning computer industry of 1960's Silicon Valley. Then he experienced his first grand-mal seizure, breaking his back and launching a decades-long battle with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. In this memoir, Marcus Byruck, aged 80, recounts the discovery of the rare form of amnesia associated with his epilepsy, which deletes memories of specific experiences, while leaving intact his ability to recall other forms of information. Since his condition ironically renders him unable to remember much of his life, he draws on the recollections of his wife and son, on the journals and records he meticulously maintained throughout his life, and on his ongoing relationships with the neuroscientists who have studied him. At each stage of his journey, he candidly describes his own psychological conditions, his struggles with debilitating depression and anxiety, and in the process offers an indictment of mainstream psychiatry's overreliance on the drugs which nearly killed him. The result is an intimate and ultimately uplifting portrait of a deeply gifted American immigrant, plagued by a disease that erases his reality with each new day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640273511

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Mind, Mood, and Memory

Marcus Byruck

Copyright © 2018 Marcus Byruck

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64027-350-4 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64027-351-1 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Childhood in London

Life in the United States

Epilepsy

Memory Loss

The Mechanics of Memory

Attempting to Regain Lost Memories

Living with Amnesia

Bipolar Mood Disorder

Searching for a Cure

Acknowledgments

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you, till China and Africa meet.

- W.H. Auden, from As I walked out one Evening. This poem has stayed with me throughout my life, a beacon of beauty and a meditation on loss. I dedicate this book to Sara, my wife, with whom I’ve recited this poem on hikes around the world. She has been a faithful and doting wife, lover, and best friend. We came from social and geographic worlds far apart but were destined to take this journey together. I love you.

And to Mischa and Chloe, our children, who have been such a joy and comfort to me throughout this journey.

It was Dr. Ted Stern, head of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, who put Humpty together again. He was the first to think mine was a story worth telling and without his medical care and encouragement, this book would never have been written.

Finally, it was my son Mischa who sat down with me for many, many hours in Mill Valley, organizing the text, adding and coloring in memories, and editing my scattered recollections to help me make this book a reality.

Introduction

I suffer from a condition called Autobiographical Amnesia, caused in my case by Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, that prevents the retention of new memories.

Like everyone, I form new memories, but instead of being stored for years, they remain for only a few days. One of my favorite movies is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray lives out the same banal workday again and again. My condition is like the reverse of his: I live each day anew, but those around me tell me I’m telling them the same things week after week.

At 79, my mind is still sharp enough to do the NY Times Crossword Puzzle, but though my wife tells me my daughter visited last week, I can’t remember a thing about it. I don’t remember my wedding, my sons’ graduation or even the play I saw last month. I have no idea where I was on 9/11. I lead an outwardly normal retiree’s life in Marin County, California--- hiking, going to movies and theater, music, dinners out, seeing friends and family, but I remember virtually nothing from the thousands and thousands of experiences I’ve had over the last fifty or so years!

In addition to the memory loss, my epilepsy caused me to suffer from a severe bipolar mood disorder for 15 years, overcome with frustration and melancholia. I have only just recovered from the worst of its effects in the last year.

These three conditions, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, mood disorder, and memory loss, all interact with and aggravate each other. TLE exaggerates my psychological reaction to life’s setbacks, stress can trigger an epileptic episode, and my moods dictate which memories I record and how. When I am happy, I can’t recall the worst episodes of my mood disorder and when I am depressed I can’t remember all the times I’ve been happy.

My memory condition is also, it seems, responsible for a strange sense I have of being existentially separated from the rest of the world, as if I were in some sense emotionally blind and unsure of my way in the world.

I’ve lived an interesting and varied life, lifting myself out of poverty in England to become a successful software consultant in Silicon Valley, and raising a healthy, happy family in California. I am proud of the life I’ve led, and I desperately want to recall it, which makes the randomness and severity of my amnesia all the more painful for me and my loved ones.

My epilepsy didn’t surface until I was 42, and so, strangely enough, I have some quite vivid memories of my younger years, but then it’s a forty-year blank. So the following memoir is reconstructed from my notes, calendars, letters and journals as well as from conversations with my family, including a series of talks my son recorded in 2015. It also includes passages written by Sara and edited by Mischa, which provide her perspective on my life.

Assembling this book has been at times a bizarre exercise, as if I am telling the story of a stranger. But it has allowed me to heal and bring closure to my depressive period. Reading it today, I am glad to have recorded at least the highlights of my life.

Childhood in London

My neighborhood

I was born in 1938 in Petticoat Lane, a neighborhood of poor Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the East End of London.

There, my parents’ families and thousands like them had duplicated their Eastern European shtetl life, scraping by on whatever trades they could. This was a Jewish ghetto, insular and closed off from the rest of English society.

My father, Isaac, was born in 1898 in a Polish shtetl. He came to England with his parents and two older brothers when he was four years old. My mother, Milly, born in 1904, was brought as an infant to England with her parents from the Ukraine.

I had three older siblings: Lily (b. 1925), Jack (b. 1930h, d. 2015), and Rita (b. 1936). The six of us lived in a flat on the second floor of a low-rise London Council (public housing) building, adjacent to the market.

The only grandparent I knew was my mother’s mother, Booba, who was kind to me, though not in the suffocating way of the classical Booba of Jewish literature. Outside of her, my parents knew nothing of the ancestors or relatives they left behind nor wanted to discuss them.

I grew up during wartime, under the constant threat of the German bombing raids of London of the early 1940’s. On bombing nights my family had to walk down three flights of steps and cross fifty yards of open playground to flee to an underground bomb shelter near our council flat. I have a snapshot image in my mind of standing on the balcony outside our flat and watching airplanes flying overhead through the open railings.

After school, I would wander past the red brick council buildings and the street vendors, listening to the mix of English and Yiddish, unaware of how different my world was from the rest of England.

In 1940, when I was two years old, my family was relocated to live with an English family in a town called Reading, about 40 miles outside London. My father commuted by train to work. My mother hated being boarded in a strange household, coping with the four children alone, and soon enough my parents opted to return the family to London, choosing to live with bombs rather than English landladies! Unlike Jews in America, my family never even tried to assimilate into English society.

My Parents

Because of their upbringing as first generation immigrants in England, my parents’ highest ambition was to simply survive. They taught us to be excessively cautious and dutiful, but did not teach us about love, joy, pleasure, or the benefits of education. They rarely indulged us with toys, treats, or outings; they were too tired or impatient or there was no money. Anyway, they said, we didn’t need such childish things.

My parents often fought, yelling at each other across the kitchen of our 2-bedroom council flat. While I felt sorry for my mother during these fights, I also usually thought my father’s complaints were justified, and I recall feeling guilty that I felt that way. His complaints were prosaic—that she nagged him; that dinner wasn’t ready when he came home after work; that she had been just lying about all day. Sometimes he would lose his temper and throw a plate. Once he broke a mirror with the fireplace poker. Although in truth we couldn’t afford it anyway,