we promised you real life love stories, and this one’s a doozy! Anne and Jim McDonnell’s life together was disrupted entirely in 1971 after Jim had a series of accidents that all involved relatively minor head injuries. One night he decided to walk home from a friend’s house but never made it back to Anne. After 24 hours, the search to find Jim was on. It was anyone’s guess what had happened, but nothing about Jim’s life suggested he would have left on purpose, and there was no evidence that he’d been the victim of foul play.
He simply vanished. It turns out that he had somehow ended up in Philadelphia with total amnesia. (Yes, we are positive this is not a plot line taken from a Nicholas Sparks book.) He built a new life in Philly working at a lunch counter and becoming an adopted father figure for a young family from his church. His new friends didn’t pry about his past, but they noted he didn’t talk much about it. You can get all the details in this unbelievable Reader’s Digest article, so we’ll cut to the chase. Fifteen years later, Jim again had a series of small accidents that involved banging his head. This time—boom!—memories of his old life came flooding back! He made his way back to the New York home he had shared with Anne and rang the doorbell… on Christmas day. (I KNOW, right?! Not Nicholas Sparks, we swear!) It didn’t take long for them to reconnect and rebuild their life together after what we could call their 15-year hiatus.
