Forever Today: A Memoir Of Love And Amnesia

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Yes. But I've never been conscious to think that. So I've never been bored or upset. I've never been anything at all, it's exactly the same as death. No dreams even. Day and night, the same. Can Wolterstorff’s three categories adequately account for the kind of beautiful, self-sacrificing love that we find in Deborah and Clive’s marriage?

She was the only Christian I knew, and as she was whispering away to God, I just felt this extraordinary power coming into me. And I knew that God was in my room. I just had this incredible sense that I was really, really loved … and that emptiness that I had been trying to fill all those years with relationships, with food, with alcohol, I was filled. ”

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Yet H.M.’s case and subsequent work made it clear that two very different sorts of memory could exist: a conscious memory of events (episodic memory) and an unconscious memory for procedures—and that such procedural memory is unimpaired in amnesia. Memory is far more intrinsically God’s business than a human concern…For the God who created us will take care of us even beyond the shadow of death…Biblically we are assured we were created ‘in the image and likeness of God,’ and that his purpose was to be Immanuel, ‘God with us.’ Israel was assured God had made a covenant with them, to be ‘their God,’ who stipulated his bond with them as ‘the God who remembers’ them. We can only fundamentally understand the category of person as a theological category, of being intrinsically relational in our creation by the triune God of grace…Primarily, God is mindful of us – not the other way around …Consequently, Christians interpret the threat of dying differently, trusting in the transcendence of God as our eternal and saving hope. I wanted to be with someone else and have kids and a regular life. Yet how can you love somebody when you already love somebody? I loved Clive,” she wrote later in her book Forever Today. A useful word for this type of promise is covenant , which I define as: a voluntary promise of love between two persons that confers rights upon both parties. What these rights involve depends largely on the content of the promises, but what’s important to note here is that these rights are created and bestowed upon the beloved. We are now in a position to propose a fourth category of love. A fourth primary color, as it were. Deborah struggled with the repetitive questions and with taking Clive on her own for weekend and days out. He would get lost in a bathroom even in his own living room, and if he wandered off he would not be able to find his way home because he did not know where he lived. Deborah started working to form and organization that could create a place for brain-damaged individuals to go, because they did not fit the disabled category in most cases because they could walk on their own. She started an organization after hearing from many other families struggling with taking care of their own brain damaged family members at home because there was nowhere to house them. Clive eventually went to a small group home that was opened in part because of Deborah’s efforts and she became a speaker on behalf of brain-damaged patients everywhere. Deborah did divorce Clive but never stopped loving him and despite trying to “escape” to the United States for a short time she could not leave Clive behind. Clive has never recovered but both of the Wearings are dealing with the dramatic loss to the best of their abilities.

The Song of Deborah, preserved in Judges 5, tells more about this final battle. It describes the chaotic conditions that exist until “I [some translations: you] arose, Deborah,/arose as a mother in Israel” (5:7). In the poetic version of events, YHWH takes part in the actual battle, causing a sudden flood: “The stars fought from heaven,/from their courses they fought against Sisera./The torrent Kishon swept them away” (5:21). This disabled the Canaanite chariots, enabling Israel’s infantry to win. To begin with, following his physical recovery, he was manically euphoric. This could lighten the atmosphere: he'd jump out of wardrobes, waltz down the ward, play the hospital jester. On the whole this jocularity protected people from registering what had happened to his mind. Sometimes it was frightening. He'd be hard to control. He leapt out of the car on the dual carriageway. He was put on all kinds of tranquillisers - 'liquid kosh', in Deborah's words. In addition to this inability to preserve new memories, Clive had a retrograde amnesia, a deletion of virtually his entire past.

What is Dragon's Den?

Fewell, Danna Nolan, and David M. Gunn. “Controlling Perspectives: Women, Men, and the Authority of Violence in Judges 4–5.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (1990): 389–411. No one remembers, word for word, all that was said in any lecture, or played in any piece. But if you understood it once, you now own new networks of knowledge, about each theme and how it changes and relates to others. Thus, no one could remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony entire, from a single hearing. But neither could one ever hear again those first four notes as just four notes! Once but a tiny scrap of sound; it is now a Known Thing—a locus in the web of all the other things we know, whose meanings and significances depend on one another. While he was working at the BBC, Wearing was made responsible for the musical content of BBC Radio 3 for much of 29 July 1981, the day of the royal wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. For that occasion, he chose to recreate, with authentic instruments and meticulously researched scores, the Bavarian royal wedding that took place in Munich on 22 February 1568. The music by Lassus, Padovano, de'Bardi, Palestrina, Gabrieli, Tallis and others was performed by the Taverner Consort, Choir and Players and the Natural Trumpet Ensemble of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, conducted by Andrew Parrott. Tamber-Rosenau, Caryn. “The ‘Mothers’ Who Were Not: Motherhood Imagery and Childless Women Warriors in Early Jewish Literature.” Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination. Edited by Jane L. Kanarek, Marjorie Lehman, and Simon J. Bronner. Jewish Cultural Studies 5. Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2017. I’d reached the end of my tether, and I rang a friend and I asked her to pray for me,” Deborah described years later.