This conclusion allows us to connect Wolterstorff’s point about God bestowing essential worth by honoring humans as potential friends with our earlier argument regarding rights and their creation and conferral through covenants. Because it is God who bestows worth and personhood upon human beings, humans possess rights even when they cannot recognize it – even when we cannot remember or recognize our own rights . Since marriage is a covenant love that analogously bestows worth on the beloved in the same way that God’s love bestows worth on humans, it follows that love for the beloved is not contingent upon her abilities or memories, rather, love for the beloved is founded upon the rights created at the inception of the marriage, ratified in the wedding vow. His story was also told in episode No. 304 – 'Memory and Forgetting' on the show Radio Lab on New York Public Radio, WNYC. [10] Earlier entries were usually crossed out, since he forgot having made an entry within minutes and dismissed the writings. He did not know how the entries were made or by whom, although he did recognise his own handwriting. [4] Wishing to record 'waking up for the first time', he still wrote diary entries in 2007, more than 20 years after he started them. In a scene from the 2005 documentary, standing in a London church, Deborah tells Clive about one of the last concerts he performed before the illness stole his memory: “It was so moving that everyone was in tears. That’s how good of a musical director you were.”

It's virtually impossible for them to leave the home without a care assistant. Two years ago they stayed, unescorted, in a hotel for Christmas and, because the electronic door alarm wouldn't work, Deborah resorted to piling tables and chairs up in front of the door to prevent him wandering away in the middle of the night. They live in a closed, insular world of two. Clive has no friends for the simple reason that he would forget who they are. 'We don't mix,' explains Deborah. 'Clive lives in his unit and goes out accompanied by members of staff. Occasionally when he's out with me he will say strange things to people in cafes like, "Are you the Prime Minister?", "Are you the Queen of England?" It's because they are the first person he has seen since waking from 'unconsciousness' that minute, so they must, he presumes, be important.'The very kind of commitment that is the essence of the traditional wedding vows as found in the Book of Common Prayer which says: I realised that we are not just brain and processes. Clive had lost all that and yet he was still Clive. Even when we didn't see one another, when we were six months apart and only spoke on the telephone, nothing had changed. Even when he was at his worst, most acute state, he still had that huge overwhelming love ... for me. That was what survived when everything else was taken away.' The duration of Clive’s short-term memory is anywhere between 7 seconds and 30 seconds. He can’t remember what he was doing only a few minutes earlier nor recognize people he had just seen. By the time he gets to the end of a sentence, Clive may have already forgotten what he was talking about. It is impossible for him to watch a movie or read a book since he can’t remember any sentences before the last one. 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, This video includes documents Clive’s story and includes footage of him struggling to form memories and his wife discussing his struggle.

Clive’s hippocampus and medial temporal lobes where it is located were ravaged by the disease. As a consequence, he was left with both anterograde amnesia, the inability to make or keep memories, and retrograde amnesia, the loss of past memories. Most patients suffer one or the other, so it's notable that Clive suffered both. He was also featured in the 1988 PBS series, The Mind, in Episode 1, In Search of the Mind. [9] A follow-up episode was aired in 1998 on the second edition of The Mind as Life Without Memory: The Case of Clive Wearing. At this, Clive is filled with emotion. Though he cannot remember the scene, or even the name of the woman describing it to him, he sensed her compassion. “I’m amazed that you would say that,” he said. “I can’t think that.” When 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. Where once they used to share a smart, book-lined flat in Maida Vale, west London, now Clive lives in a care home and Deborah visits him from her new base in Reading, two hours' drive away. There's a laminated sign on his door: Clive's room. Inside, the drawers are labelled and a notice in big letters above the sink - 'Darling!' - reminds him to clean his teeth. On his piano, sideboard, bedside cabinet - so that they are the first things he sees every morning when he opens his eyes and tries to recall who and where he is - are pictures of Deborah.To imagine the future was no more possible for Clive than to remember the past—both were engulfed by the onslaught of amnesia. Yet, at some level, Clive could not be unaware of the sort of place he was in, and the likelihood that he would spend the rest of his life, his endless night, in such a place. 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. Is it time for a Top Gear rethink? Ex-BBC host James May says it's 'time for a new format' but there is still a desire from viewers to watch fast cars We are all the sum of our memories, both recent and long ago. They are what make us who we used to be, who we are, who we become. The ancient Greeks understood. They had two rivers in Hades: Mnemosyne and Lethe, memory and oblivion. Our collective memories remind us that we're bound together. I meet Clive on the day European countries hold three minutes of silence for the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. This, one imagines, would be an irrelevance to Clive.

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.)But although he can’t remember them, Clive does know that certain events have occurred in his life. He is aware, for example, that he has children from a previous marriage, even though he doesn’t remember their names or any other detail about them. He knows that he used to be a musician, yet he has no recollection of any part of his career.