11 December 2013

The cup and the knife: the reality of caring for someone with dementia

My mother struggled to cope as her husband's personality and ability disintegrated as his brain rotted and shrank, until she contemplated committing suicide. In the end my dad died of dementia, but also because dying was the easiest way to treat him.

By Rose George

For me, it was the knives. For my mother it was the tea cup. Ordinary household objects that meant such dreadful things.

The cup came first. My mother, Sheila, now 73, asked her husband John, my stepfather for 30 years, to put a cup on a saucer. He couldn’t. He waved it about, he put it somewhere else, he put it everywhere but where it should be. She had had worries before then, at his occasional lapses of memory. She joked about him having Alzheimer’s as a way of warding it off. At that point she knew the joke was real.