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TwitThisStruggling to Cope
The chapel became the couple's sanctuary, especially during Clive's second year of hospitalization, when he was transferred to the psychiatric ward. While it was clear that her husband, who needed round-the-clock supervision, would never come home, Deborah felt that he belonged in a facility geared toward those with brain injuries. Unfortunately, there were no such centers in Britain at the time.So in 1986, Deborah gave up her job and founded the Amnesia Association to lobby for such facilities. The work kept her busy, but the strain of her situation eventually took its toll. She was forced to sell the apartment where she and Clive had lived, and take part-time work in an arts center to pay the bills. One day, on her way out the door, she suddenly dropped to the floor like a stone. She lay there, without moving, in silent despair, too drained even to cry.
She took to punching walls, at home alone, to vent her fury. For a time, she became bulimic, repeatedly gaining and losing the same 25 pounds. "It was like there was an emptiness after my husband became sick, that I could never, ever fill," Deborah says. She struggled to accept that she would never be a mother. "I didn't want to go through life without having children, and I didn't want them with anyone but Clive."
Sinking into a deep depression, she fantasized about taking Clive to the beach and walking with him into the sea until they were swallowed up. Finally, she phoned a suicide hotline. "It wasn't so much that I wanted to die," she says. "I didn't know how to live."
Friends and doctors warned Deborah, who was by now 36, that clinging to her husband was unhealthy. They suggested that she start a new life.
Each morning for eight years, Clive had woken and uttered the same words: "I haven't heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It's like being dead. How long have I been ill?" Deborah would try to answer, and the conversation would repeat itself in an endless loop. Finally, one spring day in 1993, Deborah realized she couldn't continue this way. "When I met Clive, he was everything I ever wanted in a man," she says. "I loved him desperately. But I could no longer cope with having the same conversation with him, over and over again, for years."
She began to think of going to the United States. "I just thought if I left England behind, I could leave all the pain behind too," she says.
In 1994, Deborah moved to Manhattan, living on her savings, taking courses, writing poetry, even dating. "I had two relationships, but neither lasted," she remembers. "I wasn't available. My heart belonged to Clive."
Several times a week, she phoned her husband in England to tell him about New York. Clive had moved into a specially created brain trauma unit in East Sussex and was doing well there. His medications had been adjusted, and he was no longer having violent episodes. Staff at the unit told Deborah that her husband wasn't aware that she had gone away.
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