Man Wooed Wife Every Day After Suffering Memory Loss Similar To '50 First Dates'
Adam Sandler, eat your heart out.
STEKLO / Shutterstock When 50 First Dates came out in 2004, not only was it another great movie under Adam Sandler’s belt, but it made us think about what losing our memory would be like. In the movie, Drew Barrymore’s character loses her short-term memory after a car accident, and she can only remember things from before that day.
Though it may seem far-fetched, one couple experiences that reality every single day.
Who is Cody Reinert? In preschool, Reinert met Hannah Wallace and connected again after high school while attending community college in Hutchinson, Kansas. But after a seizure, she began having no recollection of spending time with Reinert. Said Cody, “She would have this look on her face like, ‘Who are you?’”
For Wallace, her lapses were terrifying. As she recalled, “it was scary, very scary. He’d have to gain that trust all over again. Other times it made me really angry because I knew I knew him but couldn’t remember how.”
The seizures began when Wallace was 16 years old.
She was treated for epilepsy and took medication but the seizures didn’t stop and she started having lapses in memory.
Revealing to People, Wallace would “forget what day it was, the year. I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, how did I not even know my own [step]mom! I’d forget my friends so it was really hard to keep or maintain a friendship sometimes.”
But just because Wallace suffered lapses in memory, he didn’t give up on getting her to “fall in love with [him] again” after the seizures.
He eventually adapted to her memory loss. “I was fine starting over but it could get annoying. Just because you’ve spent time trying to get to know this person,” he said.
Photo: Facebook
He had methods of helping her remember him, jogging her memory in different ways.
“Like the next day after she had a seizure, I knew she wouldn’t really remember me so I brought over some cheesecake, which she had told me was her favorite. I would take her to her favorite restaurant because I knew what it was. She would say, ‘How did you know?’ And I’d say I just had a hunch,” he revealed.
In July 2018, the couple got married, one month after Wallace’s last seizure. Her doctors diagnosed them as psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. And now, Reinert has put together videos of their time together, just in case she “forgets how much he loves her," going to say, “I’m hoping that I’ve done my best to have it ready. So she’ll know.”
How sweet is that?
Samantha Maffucci is an editor for YourTango who focuses on writing trending news and entertainment pieces.
Editor's Note: This article was originally posted on September 1, 2019.