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Something has been bothering me since I finished It last week.

So, during the adults' final battle with It,

Eddie dies. They leave his body in the sewer.

Fine, good, everything makes sense in context, but

then they all start forgetting about It, Derry, and each other.

My question is this- where does that leave Eddie's wife?

Does she ever find out what happened to her husband? Does she forget about Eddie too?

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  • To be fair it's horror, so it would be in keeping with the genre for him to leave like a crazy person and for her to never see him again...
    – komodosp
    Sep 8, 2017 at 20:39

2 Answers 2

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That's a pretty great question. I would guess it might just be a plot hole that King forgot to patch up. But my view is that she did not forget about him. He left her basically high and dry with the limo company, a responsibility she clearly would not be able to handle on her own. I don't see any way her mind could convince itself she was the owner/boss of the company; she'd know something was clearly not right, that something or someone was missing. At the same time, there's no link for her to follow to figure out what happened. She didn't know where he was going, and wouldn't know who to contact to track anything else down. He didn't even fly there, so there wouldn't be a plane ticket to look up.

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Nothing about the memory loss ever suggested it extended beyond events in the town.

Whether it was simply trauma induced, or as implied part of Its larger mental warping of Derry, or just because It's presence permeating everything so thoroughly, we only ever see memory twisting in town. It happens with the adults not seeing or registering the darker things that are happening, and it happens with the kids after their first battle in the sewers. Mike, IIRC, had to struggle so it wouldn't happen to him as well. There is a gentle "go away" that seems to prevent anyone else from taking too close a look at the town and it's problems, at least until It is dead and Derry collapses into the river. No one ignores that, so that seems to be the extent of it. Bill at the end seems to be the longest holdout to forgetting a second time, and mainly that's because he's still trying to save Audra from her coma state.

You can also make the connection that the only reason the gang forget each other is that remembering them would be too close to remembering It. They aren't being erased, they still existed, and anyone who met them would still remember them. The real thing behind Pennywise is the only thing being erased, and only the people in the sewers were deeply affected enough to start blanking things wholesale. Eddie's mother certainly wouldn't forget she had a son, although I don't recall if she's still alive at that point.

Poor Stan's wife certainly isn't going to unsee his suicide in the bath. So I rather doubt that Eddie's wife will get any automatic closure through memory loss. At most it's possible she might realize he went back to Derry, and connect the dots to the disaster, and assume he died there.

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