Andrea Gillies’ award-winning account
of her family’s experience of dementia takes us on a two year
journey with Nancy, her mother-in-law, who is suffering from
Alzheimer’s Disease. Gillies, working from detailed diaries written
at the time, recalls uprooting her family to a romantically
rambling house on a remote peninsula in Scotland so that she can
care full-time for Nancy while the family, including her young
children, husband and Nancy’s partner Morris, remain together. What
ensues is a time of warmth, love and ultimately patience and
determination on all fronts, as Nancy slowly progresses down a path
of lost memories, altered personality and eventually total emersion
in what Gillies terms “dementia reality”, detached from the real
world and those close to her.
Rather than being a sad or morose account of someone’s
deterioration and mental unravelling, this book tackles dementia
frankly and appropriately with humility, compassion and empathy. We
discover the emotional highs and lows of day-to-day life, the small
triumphs and defeats, the turmoil, fear and unrest and moments of
absolute tenderness. As clinicians, this work gives an excellent
and contemporary insight into the carer’s perspective of how
elderly psychiatric services work practically, the challenges out
there and the level of coordination required when treating patients
in the community.
On reflection, the person most painfully affected by the situation
as told here is possibly Morris, Nancy’s husband. Battling with his
own health problems, he at once accepts and fights his wife’s
diagnosis. As the woman he loves slowly slips out of reach we
understand Alzheimer’s as “the long goodbye” in all too stark
reality. Gillies’ uncensored portrayals of her own and her family’s
frustrations and robust pragmatism helps to reveal the
all-encompassing effects of the disease as Nancy’s situation
progresses.
This book is an absolute must-read for all students and clinicians,
particularly with an interest in old age psychiatry. I have not
come across a work so engaging and honest about a subject we still,
as a general public, struggle to come to terms with. This is
absolutely Nancy’s story, but it is also a much wider story about
the mind, identity, and the very the fabric of what makes us who we
are.
L Kilmartin