What Dementia Teaches Us About Love
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Penguin presents the audiobook edition of What Dementia Teaches Us About Love written and read by Nicci Gerrard.
Dementia is an unmaking, a de-creation - an apocalypse of meaning. Since my father's slow-motion dying, and his actual death in November 2014, I have been much preoccupied with dementia: by those who have it, by those who look after them, by the hospital wards whose beds are occupied by those in advanced stages of this self-loss, by the way society denies it, by the science of it, the art and literature about it, the philosophy, by what it means to be human, to have an identity. What is it to be oneself, and what is it to lose one's self. Who are we when we are not ourselves, and where do we go?
This is a book about dementia - not a personal account, but an exploration, structured around this radically-slowed death. Full of people's stories, both sad and optimistic, it is a journey into the dusk and then the darkness - and then out on to the other side, where, once someone is dead, a life can be seen whole again.
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Nicci Gerrard is a writer and campaigner, a celebrated novelist and recipient of the 2016 Orwell Prize for Journalism 'Exposing Britain's Social Evils'. This work grew out of her father's death from dementia in 2014 and her belief that the disease, its impact on individuals, families and wider society, needed light thrown upon it in order to improve the experience and support of those affected.
Nicci Gerrard is also co-founder of John's Campaign, named after her father, which has campaigned to give the rights of carers of those with dementia the same rights as parents of children to accompany them in hospital. Recognised by NHS policy makers, by charities, by nurses and doctors and carers, every ward in every hospital has now signed up.
