This was one of the only two books I deliberately chose in my 2020 TBR list. Late last year I stumbled on a podcast where the author, Nicci Gerrard was featured and I knew I had to read it this year. Dementia had never been on my mental health radar but over two years ago when my dad was diagnosed with early-stage dementia, it became a constant theme in my life and our family.

My dad had worked long past the usual retirement age. This was mainly because his professional vocation occupied his life to the extend that he had almost no life outside it and was scared of the boredom that he anticipated retired life would entail. When he finally retired, he was looking forward to the living out the rest of his life in leisure and the company of my mother and doting on his grandkids. Like a thief in the night, dementia struck and his cognitive abilities deteriorated, the dynamics of his relationships took a sharp downward turn, most of all, with my mother who is now his full-time carer.

What Dementia Teaches Us About Love is a book that deftly and delicately explores the depth of dementia and its impact on those who love and are loved by its sufferers. With touching and delicately told anecdotes, it raises and explores questions that examine what it is to be human, to see life disintegrate at the onset of memory loss and dying gradually as the sufferers try to embrace a past that continually eludes them. The role of carers in the life of dementia sufferers is critical because the story of dementia is also the story of those who care for people living with the illness. I know from firsthand knowledge of my mother’s life and the delicately told anecdotes in the book, how caring for a dementia patient can be exhausting. They have to enter the sufferer’s world and do thankless acts of love for a person who is often unable to properly acknowledge. The hardest part must be when they hate themselves for resenting the sick person.

Other aspects of dementia explored in the book include shame, memory and forgetting. Shame is a central concept in dementia as the illness entails a loss of self and meaning. The unravelling of that loss is unsettling. Like the sensitively detailed anecdotes in the book, I have seen my father’s confidence in himself unravel. Sadly, this shame is often inherited by their loved ones. What Dementia Teaches Us About Love is an expertly written labour of love that is essential reading as we seek to enter into the world of dementia sufferers and make sense of this journey that seems to creep in on us unannounced. For such a delicate topic, the prose soars and rich in equal measure.

3.8/5

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