Reading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents' dementia | Jo Glanville
It was hard to communicate with my mother or father, until reading a book out loud led to a discoveryThe novelist Ian McEwan has advocated for the extension of assisted...
By Jo Glanville · The Guardian Opinion
It was hard to communicate with my mother or father, until reading a book out loud led to a discovery The novelist Ian McEwan has advocated for the extension of assisted dying to people with dementia, commenting on the deeply distressing experience of his own mother: “By the time my mother was well advanced and could not recognise anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead all at once. It was a terrible thing. And the burden on those closest is also part of the radioactive damage of it all.” My mother, Pamela, a journalist, died of vascular dementia 10 years ago. My father, the football journalist and novelist Brian Glanville , died of Parkinson’s last year after living with the illness for five years. He also had a milder form of dementia. “Radioactive damage” is certainly a vivid description of the impact of caring for someone living with a degenerative illness, but the perception that someone in the last stages of dementia may be “dead” feels wrong when I think of my parents. How are you to know what is happening in someone else’s brain? Continue reading...