Forever Today: A Memoir Of Love And Amnesia

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She tried new relationships, in particular with an actor she calls Jon, who also happened to be a troubled Vietnam veteran. 'I didn't want to marry someone else because I could never have said, "Forsaking all others". But 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. OK, I couldn't actually live with him which is why - even though I didn't know it then - I was selecting impossible people, some of them with dodgy minds.' In the end she decided to return home. To Clive, the man who had never really stopped being her husband. It was only after she returned to England, torn by what felt like the impossibility of life, that she found a future. It came from an unexpected source. You see, Mrs. Houston comes from a family history of dementia and when it became clear that she had the disease (in her late 70s) and was heading irrevocably into mental decline, Implicit in this fear is the idea of personal identity as some sort of conscious mental unity that is self-aware and can hold memories, feelings, abilities, and thoughts in one cohesive whole. We fear that with the onset of dementia, as our loved ones gradually lose this mental unity, they will lose their personhood as well. His eye fell on the book about cathedrals, and he talked about cathedral bells—did I know how many combinations there could be with eight bells? “Eight by seven by six by five by four by three by two by one,” he rattled off. “Factorial eight.” And then, without pause: “That’s forty thousand.” (I worked it out, laboriously: it is 40,320.)

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. 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. Anterograde amnesia is the loss of the possibility to make new memories after the event that caused the condition, such as an injury or illness. People with anterograde amnesia don’t recall their recent past and are not able to retain any new information. (If you have ever seen the movie 50 First Dates, you might be familiar with this type of condition.)

Celebrating the female form has been central to many of fashion’s most iconic moments over the years – spanning decades – such as Madonna’s catwalk debut for Jean Paul Gaultier in 1992, where she famously wore nothing but a high-waisted skirt and the frame of a bra. We also can’t talk about the power of the naked dress without mentioning Elizabeth Hurley, who upstaged her then-boyfriend Hugh Grant at the 1994 premiere of Four Weddings and a Funeral wearing a daring Versace dress, held together by safety pins. There are lots of implications for Covenant Love, but for this presentation I will focus on its implications for two issues in particular: 1) its presence in the Bible as a model of human relationships and 2) what it implies for our treatment of those suffering from dementia and other mental illnesses. Where, in the entire modern arsenal of materialist evolution, self-help, and expressive individualism is love like that to be found? Much less explained. Each of these dominant theories that claim to explain so much only turns the search for love and purpose inward. In the end, as Augustine described, these eternal values become incurvatus in se, destructively turned in on themselves—no help in the face of serious struggle. Deborah thinks that repetition has slightly dulled the very real pain that goes with this agonized but stereotyped complaint, but when he says such things she will distract him immediately. Once she has done this, there seems to be no lingering mood—an advantage of his amnesia. And, indeed, once we returned to the car Clive was off on his license plates again. We had not made our marriage vows in church the first time round so this would be much more powerful. Clive was able to participate completely, remembering the Lord’s Prayer and saying all that he wanted to say. The best bit was when we knelt down and our joined hands were wrapped in a golden sash. It went beyond a physical joining. It felt like we were touching something of eternity.

Wearing developed a profound case of total amnesia as a result of his illness. Because of damage to the hippocampus (an area required to transfer memories from short-term to long-term memory), he is completely unable to form lasting new memories. His memory for events lasts between seven and thirty seconds. [2] He spends every day 'waking up' every 20 seconds or so, 'restarting' his consciousness once the timespan of his short-term memory has elapsed. During this time, he repeatedly questions why he has not seen a doctor, as he constantly believes that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state. If he is engaged in conversation, he is able to provide answers to questions, but he cannot stay in the flow of conversation for longer than a few sentences and is angered if he is asked about his current situation. Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative FuturesWhen I asked Deborah whether Clive knew about her memoir, she told me that she had shown it to him twice before, but that he had instantly forgotten. I had my own heavily annotated copy with me, and asked Deborah to show it to him again. If the damage is limited to the medial temporal lobe, then one expects an impairment such as H.M. had. With somewhat more extensive medial temporal lobe damage, one can expect something more severe, as in E.P. [a patient whom Squire and his colleagues have investigated intensively]. With the addition of frontal damage, perhaps one begins to understand Clive’s impairment. Or perhaps one needs lateral temporal damage as well, or basal forebrain damage. Clive’s case is unique, because a particular pattern of anatomical damage occurred. His case is not like H.M. or like Claparède’s patient. We cannot write about amnesia as if it were a single entity like mumps or measles. Wearing also organised The London Lassus Ensemble, designing and staging the 1982 London Lassus Festival to commemorate the composer's 450th Anniversary. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

The very kind of commitment that is the essence of the traditional wedding vows as found in the Book of Common Prayer which says: Clive’s struggle has been well chronicled in two documentaries, the first produced in 1986 and the second in 2005. Clive retains some knowledge—he can play piano expertly, for example, and remembers that he is married—he doesn’t remember the wedding, his children, or his wife’s name. The dominant experience of Clive’s life, repeated hundreds of times a day, is of waking up from a coma for the very first time, without knowledge of who or where he is.Episodic memory depends on the perception of particular and often unique events, and one’s memories of such events, like one’s original perception of them, are not only highly individual (colored by one’s interests, concerns, and values) but prone to be revised or recategorized every time they are recalled. This is in fundamental contrast to procedural memory, where it is all-important that the remembering be literal, exact, and reproducible. Repetition and rehearsal, timing and sequence are of the essence here. Rodolfo Llinás, the neuroscientist, uses the term “fixed action pattern” ( FAP) for such procedural memories. Some of these may be present even before birth (fetal horses, for example, may gallop in the womb). Much of the early motor development of the child depends on learning and refining such procedures, through play, imitation, trial and error, and incessant rehearsal. All of these start to develop long before the child can call on any explicit or episodic memories. This passage brings together several of the threads we have been considering. As we have shown above, covenant love takes its structure from God’s worth bestowing love for human beings. Furthermore, God’s love is what grounds personhood and human dignity upon which our rights supervene. Therefore, it is God’s memory of us that qualifies us as human persons, even if we are in an advanced state of dementia. My argument is that if any particular marriage is to survive something as traumatic as severe brain damage or dementia, a defining feature of that love relationship must be a commitment to promises one has made in these vows, namely to love the person one has been married to.

Stökl, Jonathan. “Deborah, Huldah, and Innibana: Constructions of Female Prophecy in the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible. Journal of Ancient Judaism 6:3 (2015): 320-334. But what we are looking for is not a form of love that causes or brings about enhancement of worth but one that as such bestows worth on its object. It’s the being loved that gives one the worth, not what the love causes. The fact that the Alzheimer’s patient is a recipient of love-bestowing worth has to be compatible with the fact that she remains an Alzheimer’s patient. The application here is obvious. Despite an objective view of the situation, Deborah remarried Clive because of their shared history, their bond. She was emotionally invested in the good of his flourishing and treated him with due respect for his worth by caring for and remarrying him.

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Bal, Mieke. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.