“They say want to support me but they don’t. They are always busy” he said
I remembered and said “They were here when I visited before?”
“ I haven’t seen them since” he said unhappily
“I rang and asked if she could have her mum for the afternoon next week to let me go to my club’s dinner but no, she was busy herself” he said.
He looked across at his wife who asked me again if I would like a coffee. “Sometimes she thinks I’m her brother but at the moment she still seems to recognise my voice so it doesn’t last long”.
“This is our second marriage you know” he told me.
I said that yes I knew. I wanted to talk a little bit about how knowledge about the disease would help so much: it could enable him to have a little patience with her (and peace for himself) if her knew what was happening to her.
“When her grandson was terribly ill she shut me out,
her own children and her grandson were all she cared about.
He died, he was only eight she shut me out she had a stroke and now I am expected to care for her, it’s hard” he said as the tears came.
“The day she doesn’t recognise me I will need your help to find a care home” he sobbed.

“Of course I’ll help and until that day I’ll help you to try to understand the disease and help you to care in the best way you can”.

It was a large room with the furniture set on two sides of a square. The settee was at right angles to the two chairs that were separated by the door to the hall and the rest of the house.
I was shown in and offered a seat on the settee. My lady wondered if she should sit by me. “Oh yes please” I said, “Then I will be able to hear you.”

“I want to care for her until the end” he said with tears in his eyes.
“Of course, that’s just what I will be able to help you do.
We don’t put people in care unless it is absolutely necessary these days,
how long have you been married?” I ask gently
“55 years” he said. Smiling now, “She was my first and only love”.
I talk to him a little about living with someone with a memory loss, about strategies that help.
“Sometimes I get so very cross with her, I know it is not her fault but I can’t help it.” He told me.
“One of the best strategies for coping is to walk away. Go into another room for a few minutes, try to calm down and return to the room, maybe with a smile on your face? She may of course have forgotten the incident by then.” I told him very gently.
“We have a very nice extension at he back of the house. I put her in there for a while and come in here and watch the sport on TV”

“Of course I don’t forget to eat, I cook for myself every day! She flew at me.
Ooops, wrong tone in my question, so easily done.
“Yesterday I cooked a chicken and roast potatoes and some vegetable just the way I have always done.” She said almost crossly.
“Oh that’s wonderful” I said, “I love to cook for my family but don’t always have the time now that I work”. “May I have a glass of water?” I ask the lady of the house.
“Of course my dear” she says so sweetly as she gets to her feet and heads to the kitchen.
I follow her, and as I step through the door I notice the most enormous dead plant resting in the sink.
It has been the only occupant of that place in many a week by the looks of things.
“Oh we have plants in common too” I exclaim. “Is this chap having a holiday?”
“I do this too, I pop them in the sink while I go to work, it’s a bit like self watering” I laugh and my lady laughs too.
I look around the room.
It has been many months since any food has been prepared here and many weeks since any of the cups on the side have been washed in this sink.
We talk about the plants, their names, their likes and dislikes until my request for water has been forgotten.
I leave with the promise to return again to help with the watering and pruning.

The lady of the house is an artist and book collector and has memory loss.
She lives on the top floor of a fabulous Victorian house now converted into 6 flats. My lady’s flat has three double bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and sitting room.
The sitting room is easily 18ft square with two enormous sash windows over looking the bay. It is utterly delightful. My lady has lived alone in the flat for the past 15 years.
Every wall in every room has been shelved out to accommodate her book collection. The books, once beautifully arranged in rows as in a library have had to accommodate more books now lying flat on top of them.
Small books gather dust in front of taller books. Postcards gather in small gaps between books. On narrow shelves photographs stand precariously in front of books.
In the sitting room a huge, once loved dining table is piled high with magazines and their free classical music CD’s carefully removed and stacked 15 high. Not an inch of the once polished tabletop is visible.
On the floor leaning against the walls and themselves are the paintings she has done over a lifetime. They are stacked as if in storage in a warehouse. They line three of the walls in the sitting room.
Each bedroom is identically filled with her books and paintings. Her bedroom houses her now unused easel and paints alongside her single bed. Her dressing table mirror is hung with strings of beads, necklaces and bracelets.
It is like Aladdin’s cave, full to the brim of lovely things as her collecting has encompassed the pretty artefacts she is unable to resist in the equally pretty shops in her town.
Even the once large Victorian hallway is lined with bookcases, the top shelves of which are too tall to reach and each bookcase is now full to tipping.