Washing bio gel or quid in the drum
Good Morning Thursday 25th April 2024
Army horses loose on London streets
Angela Rayner lashes out and calls Sunak “pint sized loser”.
One day in 1998, I got a call at work. My Mum had broken her hip and was in hospital. She had suffered a stroke – and it wasn’t the first. That was the start of our dementia journey together. She spent the next ten years in three care homes and the whole family went into a slow, painful mourning.
But her dementia was a huge gift to me. We had never been close, my Mum and me; but over time, even as her condition worsened, I got to know, respect and love her and we became increasingly close. By the end of her life, she still knew me – and finally, I knew her.
I was appalled by what the dementia was doing to her. With her fast-diminishing ability to grasp what was going on around her, I knew I would “lose” her – she could easily become just another stranger amongst strangers. So I started reading. I gobbled up every book I could find on dementia and dementia care, on memory, reminiscence, neuroscience, validation therapy and more, building a library of knowledge, wisdom and expertise about how we care for those with this terrible disease.
I came across a comparatively recent discovery, the “reminiscence bump”. I learnt that, with her long-term memory still in pretty good shape, Mum would still be able to enjoy – and communicate - her past life experiences and background if there were triggers for her and that this would help her carers to care for her better, too. I built an album of her growing-up years with simple autobiographical captions. “This is My Life” became her talisman, right to the very end.
Then, (rashly, some thought) I left a career in creative media to pursue the idea of doing this for other sufferers too. So now I have a new career; writing and speaking about my passions, facilitating skills development programmes for care staff and learning workshops for families; running conversation and life story projects for people with dementia and developing new products for them.
All good stuff, but what I can never forget is that it's my lovely Mum who helped me do it - in ways she would never know and could never have imagined.
Read more from Sarah Reed on her blog The Age Page - and add your comments on this post here.