Beyond the Moon

Chapter 36

We found out after the funeral that Jamie was diagnosed with a heart condition and didn't tell anyone about it. Somehow he had overdosed on his medication, and it was most likely accidental but there was no concrete way of knowing that. I didn't know why we needed to know. He was gone, and that was that.

Molly and I ended up moving to Newton and I took Jamie's job at the school, since I did have the qualifications now and most of the kids already knew me. I enjoyed it much more than I liked architecture. I remembered Mrs Wells when she said she was surprised I wasn't planning on teaching choir myself. It was then I understood why.

We overall had all of the same successes the group had under Jamie's direction. It took a year or two for me to truly get the hang of the job, taking care of just about everything on my own, but I did, and I loved it.

Carrie Ann was studying to be a nurse, and if you ask me or anyone she associated with, she was more cut out to be a nurse than most girls who go into the field. Growing up with an autistic older brother, and an autistic dad, as we've determined, as well as my severe epilepsy, it probably put her in the right place emotionally. I was afraid I had traumatised her, but if I did, I was glad she could flip the negative into a positive. I hoped that she would be one of the few caring and understanding nurses, and the favorite nurse of those who ended up in the hospital often. I was confident she would be.

Carrie Ann didn't remember George at all, but I remember her coming home for the holidays and explaining something in her studies that sounded familiar. I explained who George was and what happened to him, and the fact that it was such a mystery what he was dealing with.

"You never even had an idea what it was?" she asked.

"None at all"

"I'm only going into nursing, so I'm not the most informed in that field, but that sounds like a textbook case of temporal lobe epilepsy."

"I've never even heard the phrase, but I guess, I don't know."

"I can't really think of anything else it would be."

"Why wouldn't he say that?"

"It was only discovered in like, 1981? I think? So yeah, it probably took ages for him to figure out what it was, and he probably didn't want to tell you."

"Why wouldn't he, we'd be one in the same, I'd have someone to relate to."

"You probably already did relate in a lot of ways where that didn't need to be said, and honestly, he probably didn't want to scare you. It doesn't look bad, but it can be very bad. If it killed him, it probably was."

After speaking to her it was hard to believe I never suspected that of him at all. There were a lot of similarities, with the loss of freedoms and memory issues and randomly blacking out. I just never really thought about it.