Significant others
Seeing your husband battle dementia is heartbreaking – especially when it strikes early
Hannah Riches, 49, is married to Neil, 58. She lives in Reading with daughters Milly, 14, and Bessie, 12.
Watching Neil attempt to draw the hands and numbers on a clock face, I finally accepted what I had feared for months. My wonderful, articulate, clever, gregarious and capable husband wasn’t simply becoming forgetful and scatty. He hadn’t grown bored or uninterested in our family life. He had dementia – aged just 51.
Although that formal diagnosis in 2014 was upsetting, it was also a relief. There was a reason behind what we’d all been struggling with for a while. When Neil battled with clock-face dementia tests, where he had to write clock numbers on a circle and then draw on the hands to show certain times, it was part of the confirmation of the disease. The first signs started around a year earlier – they were low-key at first. Neil kept losing things. He was vague on recent conversations. He’d ask if I’d like a cup of tea and then I’d find him in the kitchen washing up, all memory of the cuppa gone.
The children were young, Milly six and Bessie four, and family life was hectic. I put his memory lapses down to our busy lives and the fact that he’d always been forgetful. We both worked – Iran my own craft business and Neil had a highpressure job as a police driver. It was his work colleagues who first flagged up a potential problem. And while Neil passed the occupational-health basic memory tests, he was moved to an office job.
At home, I started noticing that he was struggling to recall large chunks of conversations about major events, such as selling our house. When it came to moving day, Neil crumbled. On reflection, I think his brain simply couldn’t cope with the upheaval and change, leaving him confused and distressed. The night before he was due to return to work, he broke down in tears. ‘I can’t go back,’ he told me. ‘I know you can’t,’ I said. ‘You’re obviously not well. Let’s go to the doctor.’ He agreed and that’s when the tests started and the diagnosis arrived – early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Overnight, everything became my responsibility. We talked openly about his diagnosis and what it might mean, and he was most upset about how it would impact the family. He was distressed at what he had ‘done’ to me and the girls. He wanted to be open about it though, particularly with our daughters. There’s often a stigma attached to a dementia diagnosis, but Neil’s attitude was: it’s a disease and I’m not ashamed of it. Sadly, the empathy we had in our relationship ebbed away pretty quickly and that was hard. But I knew it wasn’t Neil, it was the disease.
