“So I came back from the hospital,” Cyndi continues. “I saw there were photos of my family, and I didn’t know exactly who everybody was…. I knew my name was Cyndi Steele, but that didn’t make any sense to me. Nothing made any sense.”
Cyndi was suffering from severe amnesia brought on by blunt head trauma and a concussion. Unable to remember the simplest things, she began staying at home, alone, isolated from an unfamiliar world.
“I found some journals, and I thought they would help me piece things together. They were disjointed, but it helped. There were still so many gaps,” Cyndi explains. “And I didn’t want to meet people. It was too frustrating.”
A worried friend finally convinced Cyndi to join her for a night out. As they sat watching a movie, Cyndi noticed that something about the man sitting next to her seemed familiar.
“And I just kinda looked at him,” remembers Cyndi, “and I said, ‘Did I know you before?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, I’m Chris Harrod.’”
“We were watching the movie, having a great time,” Chris adds, “and the whole time, I’m thinking, This is strange…. I’m starting to be attracted to somebody who I’ve known since they were twelve. Who doesn’t remember who I am. This is really weird.”
A few days later, Chris spent an evening with Cyndi talking about his acting career and how it had brought him to New York. But he didn’t bring up the past. As far as Cyndi knew, she was meeting him for the first time. Chris was very moved by how hard she tried to act like nothing was wrong.
“Now, I just thought that she was really brave and strong, and I thought, I’m gonna sit here as long as she’ll let me. And then we were just together, we were inseparable,” says Chris.
A few weeks later, Cyndi returned to Oklahoma, hoping her parents could help fill in the gaps in her life.
“And I said, ‘I’m seeing this guy. His name is Chris Harrod,’” recalls Cyndi. “And they just about choked, because the psychiatrist told them, ‘Don’t bring up her past. Just be open to what she’s doing—as hard as that will be for you.’”
And so Cyndi’s parents kept quiet. Then one afternoon, while paging through a scrapbook, she found pictures of the man she’d left behind in New York.
“The more I dig, I find picture after picture of Chris,” exclaims Cyndi. “Cutouts with ‘I love you’ or ‘You’re so cute’ written on them. And I’m just laughing, and when I open the door, my parents are laughing, ’cause they were dying to tell me this forever.”
They told her how she used to hang around the community theater, watching her dad perform … and always hoping to get a glimpse of Chris. The story jogged her memory, and suddenly she remembered how she’d once told her parents that, one day, she would marry Chris Harrod.
“It was just like something clicked. I just went to the phone and called him, and I was like, ‘I was totally in love with you,’” Cyndi recounts.
Chris adds, “And I thought, This is fate. This is what it is, this is fate. I mean, you don’t just meet somebody and then have this happen and not automatically think that there’s something special going on here.”
Chris’s prediction came true on December 22, 1995. And today, the happy couple has added another little miracle to their life: their son, Dalton. Even though Cyndi has recovered only thirty percent of her long-term memory, she believes that she has enough good memories to last her a lifetime.
“The few I have,” confirms Cyndi, “I’ll treasure them. I wouldn’t change it. Something good came out of that accident.”
When Elsa Amador was twelve years old and living in Puerto Rico, she met a young boy who was the son of Roberto Clemente, the legendary baseball player who had been tragically killed in a plane crash. Elsa and Roberto junior instantly felt a strong attraction to each other.
“We told each other we loved each other every day…. I mean, every day, like twenty-five times a day,” says Elsa.
In spite of their tender age, Roberto and Elsa believed they would spend their lives together. But a tragic event tore them apart. Elsa’s father was the innocent victim of a botched robbery attempt. And now, his family was in extreme danger.
Elsa’s mother had identified the man who killed her husband and was receiving death threats. The FBI moved in to take control of the situation. Elsa had only enough time to briefly call Roberto before she and her family were rushed out of the country, into the Witness Protection Program.
“I explained to him that we had to leave,” Elsa recounts. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell him where we were going. I just kept telling him how much I cared for him and not to blame me for what I was going to do…. It was out of my control.”
Elsa spent the next few years moving around the United States. But she never forgot her childhood sweetheart.
“I thought about him all the time,” Elsa admits. “I would sometimes close my eyes and see an image of him. He was really thin and tall and just smiling all the time. As time went on, I sort of assumed he had his own life. I just imagined him settled and married….”
In November of 1996, Elsa’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She had always felt responsible for separating her daughter from her childhood sweetheart. On her deathbed in the hospital, she made a startling request, urging Elsa to find her lost love.
“Find Roberto,” Elsa’s mother told her. “He’s the man for you.”
“So I asked, ‘How am I going to find him?’ And she said, ‘You should find him.’ And so I kind of brushed it off,” says Elsa.
And then, a few months after her mother’s death, Elsa had a sudden, unexplainable urge to attend a Yankees baseball game.
“It was as if something was just pushing me,” describes Elsa.
Whatever was pushing Elsa to the stadium, got her there an hour early that day—just in time for a pre-game event. The Yankees were celebrating Hispanic Heritage Day, and there in center field, accepting an award for his father, was Elsa’s long lost love—Roberto Clemente, Jr.
“It was really strange,” Elsa recalls with wonder. “I thought, What is he doing there? I haven’t seen him for all of these years and all of a sudden I see him at the park.”
After the ceremony, Roberto disappeared from the field. Elsa spent the next nine innings of the game desperately trying to locate him, but without success. The boy she had never forgotten … the man her mother begged her to find … was closer than he’d ever been in over fifteen years, and still he was out of reach. Finally, a security guard gave her a possible lead, the phone number of a local sports cafe. Elsa called and left a message, and the next day Roberto returned the call and arranged to meet again the woman he had been separated from so many years ago.
“I felt like I had just seen her yesterday,” declares Roberto. “Like I had just been with her in school the day before. And the feelings that I had for Elsa were so strong. My friends, everybody, knew about Elsa. It was something that I just … I kept her alive in my heart.”
On Valentine’s Day, 1998, Roberto and Elsa made their reunion complete when they married in New York City. Today, they still marvel over how powers far beyond their own made the dying wish of Elsa’s mother come true.
“I truly believe that our parents had a meeting in heaven and said, ‘Wait a second … let’s do something here,’” Roberto says. “I believe that it was meant to be, and I truly believe that it was a time where our parents’ souls got together and said,