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Clive Wearing stares into space. But the moment his wife, Deborah, enters the room, his face lights up, and he springs to his feet. He pulls Deborah to him, then whirls her around, sending her strawberry-blond curls flying. "You're gorgeous. I adore you."It is exactly what he says each time he sees her. "Isn't she lovely?" he asks, kissing Deborah's hands as she giggles. Minutes later, when Deborah steps away, the light goes out of Clive's blue eyes. "Somebody told me my wife is here," he says worriedly, "but I've never seen her. I've never seen a human being for 20 years. I've never seen anything, heard anything. Days and nights are exactly the same. Precisely like death. I'd like to be alive."
When Deborah first met Clive, she was 21, a shy soprano in a choir he was conducting. He was 40, charismatic and driven; Deborah was taken with his Celtic, aquiline features. As the choir-master of the famed London Sinfonietta, director of the London Lassus Ensemble and one of the leading Renaissance music scholars in the world, he'd collaborated with such composers as John Tavener, Michael Nyman, even Beatle Ringo Starr. His special programs of Renaissance wedding music created for the BBC for Prince Charles and Princess Diana's wedding were leather-bound and presented to Diana at Buckingham Palace.
"The most important things cannot be spoken; that's why there's music," Clive told Deborah on their first date. She didn't know those words would sustain her in the years to come.
In March 1985, just 18 months after celebrating their marriage at the acclaimed Royal Festival Hall, Clive was struck down with what is believed to be the most extreme case of amnesia ever recorded. The herpes simplex virus, cause of the common cold sore, had traveled to his brain, wiping out his entire memory center, including the hippocampus and areas that control emotion and behavior. Known in this form as herpes encephalitis, the extremely rare disease strikes some 2,000 Americans a year. Left untreated, 70 percent of patients die; more than half of the survivors are left with neurological damage, though in most cases much less devastating than Clive's.
"It's as if Clive's every conscious moment is like waking up for the first time," explains Deborah, who now works as a communications officer for the British National Health Service. "Tests show that my husband's memory is just seven seconds long. Any new information given to him melts as fast as snowflakes on the skin, leaving no trace."
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