John and Bonnie Suchet

I watched John Suchet's interview on TV today - he was talking about his life with his wife Bonnie and how he was trying to come to terms with her illness - Dementia. It was so heart wrenching to see the angst and frustration in this man trying to sum up his feelings. In an article in the Telegraph two things stood out for me:
“But in planning for old age, I had forgotten the most important aspect:
health. You hope you’ll get away with it. I had assumed we would die in one
another’s arms with Beethoven playing in the background.”

Now the 17 photograph albums might as well not exist. Suchet, 64, cannot
derive any comfort from them without her. “Will I ever open those albums
again? To see how she was! How could I show them to her now? It would break
me up to see her reaction. The past we shared is a closed book to her. It
has gone.”

Drifting calmly and smilingly through the early stages of dementia, Bonnie has
lost the ability to relate to him as a husband. Six months ago, she started
to call him John instead of love, or darling or sweetheart. 'Thank you so
much, John,’ she will say. I have gone from being her lover to her principal
carer. When I hug her, it’s almost a gesture she doesn’t recognise. She
doesn’t know how to react. We would never fall asleep on opposite sides of
the bed – and if we woke up apart we would make up for that pretty damn
quick. Our intimacy was just so…well, nothing was too intimate. The Bonnie I
loved has actually gone. It’s as if she has died. Dementia has taken her.”
“It was a relief because I knew by then that it was something serious. I must
have smiled. She smiled because I smiled. She was looking to me to know how
she should react. I said: 'Don’t worry. Everything’s fine.’ And she believed
me. Still does. The only good thing I’ll say about this ------- disease is
that it protects the person from what is going on.”
There can be no disease as unquantifiable or as intensely personal, he says.
Yet in the fog there are “little shafts of light”, like the moment she
laughed at a joke – and a rarer moment when she made one – referring to
herself as “Bonnie@confused.com.”

Having been a Psychiatric Nurse for 25plus years specialising in Older Peoples Mental Health it is refreshing to see this damning illness finally getting major airtime and recognition - maybe enough to spur on research on par with heart disease and the like

Yes I hope it does bring it to peoples awareness and more is given to understanding, as it is one of those illnesses that gets swept under the carpet so to speak.

Unlike the Jade Goody senario where celeberities are gaining more publicity offering goodwill, yet thousands of women suffer the same.

unfortunately, that is our society...unless it happens to a celebrity its not real
Terry Prachett is doing his thing to raise awareness of dementia but that is from the sufferers perspective...john looks at the constant state of grieving - it has often been dubbed the "long goodbye" and "living death"