DEMENTIA IN SOCIETY
Dementia in the arts: An interview with celebrated author Nicci Gerrard
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I learnt so much from all the people who were so honest and generous with their experiences. There were the doctors, the nurses, the scientists, the artists, the Alzheimer Europe speaks to Nicci Gerrard (a.k.a. Nicci French, philosophers, who have given when writing psychological thrillers such as the Frieda Klein me new ways of seeing an illness series, together with her husband Sean French) about her new which is everywhere. Above non-fiction book “What Dementia Teaches Us About Love”. all, there were those men and women living with dementia Many people know you as Nicci French, watered the tomatoes, fed the birds, built and their carers.”
author of psychological thrillers. Your book “What Dementia Teaches Us About Love?” is quite a departure from that style of writing. What prompted you to write this book and how was it to write something so different and so personal? I was a journalist before I became Nicci French and I have continued writing pieces for the newspaper where I worked about issues that I most care about. So in a way, I’ve always had this other voice.
Perhaps I wouldn’t have written “What Dementia Teaches Us About Love” – or “Words Fail us” in Dutch – if I hadn’t had that other voice. But it grew out of a very personal experience. My father, John Gerrard, had Alzheimer’s. He lived, and mostly lived well, with the illness for more than ten years – at home with my mother, who he had been married to for 61 years at the time of his death. He walked by the river, worked in his garden,
bonfires, and stared for hours at tiny insects or wildflowers. He saw his friends, teased his grandchildren, and told stories about his past, which remained vivid to him. Although he was gradually going towards the darkness and was sometimes scared, sometimes felt ashamed, he was mostly happy. Then he went into hospital with leg ulcers which were slow to heal. He was there for nearly five weeks, and because of strictly enforced visiting hours and an outbreak of norovirus, there were many days when he didn’t see his family at all. With no-one to help him eat, drink, walk; no-one to speak to him, read to him, hold his hand, look him in the eye, he catastrophically declined. He went in healthy, mobile, articulate and living with dementia. When I collected him, he was immobile (he couldn’t walk, or stand on his own two feet, or lift his head from the pillow), inarticulate (he couldn’t put a sentence together), skeletal and wrecked. He was no longer living with dementia, but dying with it.
His dying took nine months, during which time he lay in a little room downstairs while his family tried to do all the things we hadn’t done for him while he was in hospital. It was too late. We were too late. When he eventually left us it was both a sorrow and a blessing. And yet my father was gone and yet he was there, he was absent and yet present, he had lost everything and yet in some strange way he retained his self, this essence that made him John Gerrard. After he died, I knew that there was a book I could write, a book about the meaning and the cost of dementia, and about what it teaches us about ourselves, about what we value and about being human. But I didn’t know whether I would write it. My
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We need to share stories more, talk more openly about it. So I feel privileged to be part of this new conversation.”
Nicci and her father John
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