I’ve written a book. A memoir all about the last few years when instead of writing I became a carer for my husband Bill. He was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia in March 2019 and died in March 2022. Only three years it took for that terrible disease to kill him.
I stopped writing during those years. I had neither the time or the energy to do it. My life was subsumed into caring for Bill. I tried to get as much help for us as I could so I joined Dementia Research. A student contacted me looking for people she could talk to about having carers in the home so for six months I had sessions over Zoom when she asked me about how things were going. I talked. And talked. She recorded our sessions, transcribed them and sent them to me after she had completed her research.
I also wanted the professionals who were dealing with Bill to be aware of the person he’d been, and not to regard him as just a poor old soul so I wrote a brief summary of all the things he’d done, his sporting achievements, the countries we’d lived in and the sights and experiences we’d had as a family and made sure there were copies of it in all his medical files.
After Bill died, I read the student’s transcripts over and realised how much I had forgotten about those terrible days. I wanted to recall other aspects so I started jotting down brief paragraphs about trying to find food that he could eat, about the sheer exhaustion of it all and what it did to me, about the carers who came to help, about the guilt and the sadness and the laughs. Yes, we even managed to laugh at times.
Then there were the diaries of our travels that I found when I was clearing out, the letters I’d sent home, the articles I’d written for an online site dealing with countries to see and visit. A tremendous amount of material and the only thing to do with it was to shape it into a book.
It took me over a year and many tears and much frustration but it’s now finished. Hopefully it will be published in the autumn.
Can’t wait to share it with you!
ann burnett 