Forever Today by Deborah Wearing

A Metheringham Book Readers Group Review

Forever Today by Deborah Wearing is her astonishing account of her husband Clive's devastating amnesia, which struck almost overnight and wiped out his entire past.
It could be argued that, in a way, all writers are concerned with recollection, whether it's mining childhood for a first novel or excavating a famous person's life for a biography. This book gives a clear and terrifying picture of a life without any recollections.

This book is many things; an informative guide for carers for brain-injury survivors, a biography of a man who was once a world expert on early music and an inspiring conductor and a portrait of a remarkable and enduring relationship.
Neurologist Oliver Sacks suggested 'One tended to think of (Clive), instinctively, as a spiritual casualty - a lost soul. Was it possible that he had really been "de-souled" by the disease?' Deborah came to the conclusion that 'there is still a Cliveness about Clive'. She still sees in him a kindness, a generosity, a way of looking at the world that is uniquely him.

She never once wishes him dead, which is remarkable in itself. Death would release them both from an unbearable way of life.

She wrote it, she says, 'in bed, instead of sleeping'. And, although this is left unspoken, presumably to fill the gap her husband used to fill. She lost a great deal when he fell ill. 'I had my own dislocation, too. Nowhere was home anymore. No where. It was too full of Clive and therefore too sad. The walls were yammering with his unfinished work: projects, music, schemes.' She loves words, and writes carefully. But for a moment her vocabulary fails her. 'Uneverythinged.'

Following the illness it's striking how they react in similar ways. Both are quick to laugh and cry, both find solace in music (eerily, one of the few things Clive can still do is conduct and play the piano, although he has no knowledge that he has done so immediately afterwards.) Both are lost and bewildered: Clive in his head, Deborah trying to find help and support. Both are together but also alone.

Time passes - for Deborah, but not for Clive. In the book she's 30, 35, 40, and Clive is frozen in the same moment forever.

It's a desperately sad book, and I couldn't help thinking that what had happened to them could have happened to anybody, to me, to my husband, and that they had done nothing to bring this tragedy upon themselves.They did not deserve this. Few writers of fiction would have left the reader so wrung out, so devoid of any hope of redemption, but this is non fiction, and tells what happened with unflinching clarity.

The group gave it 6½ for enjoyment and 7 for the quality of the writing.

Jayne