Wendy Mitchell on her extraordinary Alzheimer’s memoir

Diagnosed at 58, Mitchell was determined not to be beaten: ‘Why feel ashamed of having a complex brain disease?’

The word can seem like a sentence, and the sentence can bring a sense of helplessness, dread, despair. Dementia – the D-word – is the illness we fear the most. Many people, at the diagnosis, jump-cut forward to their anticipated end, where memories have slid away in catastrophic chunks, where language jumbles up and is lost, where chaos and loss squat in the ruins of the self. Old men and old women trapped in a disintegrating body and a failing mind…

I first see Wendy Mitchell standing at the large window of her front room, looking out. She is slender and upright, with short, peppery-brown hair and a small, neat face, and she is wearing a blue shirt that glows in the damp winter day. She smiles as I approach, a wide and undefended smile. When she opens the door, she is welcoming and although she had said in advance she was anxious about my visit, she seems relaxed and alert. The house is scrupulously tidy and clean; everything has its proper place. There’s a large diary in the kitchen whose pages are interleaved with email print-outs; there’s a wall calendar with appointments marked up in large, legible letters. I notice, as she moves about making me tea, that she has a slightly wide-legged and rolling gait, like someone standing on the deck of a ship. When she speaks, there’s an almost imperceptible blurriness to her words, as if they’re beginning to lose their hard edges and melt together. I see these things only because I know that she has been given the sentence that most of us fear.

Friends who stop have declined so quickly. I’ve got to keep doing. It’s a scheming disease. You have to outmanoeuvre it

Continue reading... January 28, 2018 at 01:30PM