Anna Richardson: Love, Loss & Dementia
As Anna Richardson talked to her father, James, about his failing memory on Love, Loss & Dementia, he asked her shrewdly, ‘Are you interviewing me?’
It was a flash of his real personality — masked by illness, but not erased.
And it captured what most families who have nursed a parent with dementia know very well: underneath the disease, the person they love is often still there.
Dementia is Britain’s biggest killer, claiming more lives than heart disease or cancer, presenter Anna claimed.
In its later stages, it becomes a battleground in the brain, causing devastation like the craters and smoke from explosions.
Anna Richardson (L) is presenting her most personal TV show to date about dementia – a disease her father Jim (R) suffers from
Anna has said the best way they cope with the difficult reality of dementia is through humour (pictured: Anna helping her dad Jim)
But beneath that hellscape, something human takes shelter and frequently survives to the end.
Canon James Richardson is in the thick of that battle.
He’s aware that his mind is failing, and carries a piece of paper with his symptoms listed, to remind himself of them.
Explaining his problems to other people is doubly hard, since the Richardson attitude to mental deterioration is typically British: best not to mention it.
And if you must say something, for goodness sake make it a joke.
Even though the whole point of this one-off documentary was to tackle the disease head-on, Anna couldn’t stop herself from deflecting her distress with humour.
When her father read out that list (‘Confusion, bladder, memory’), she quipped, ‘Is that me?’ Laughter, of course, is currently the best treatment.
What drugs do exist for managing Alzheimer’s are deemed too expensive for widespread use by the NHS.
You might as well grit your teeth and try to get through the worst of it with a smile. What else is there to do?
Awful as it is to watch a beloved older relative splinter and disintegrate, the prospect of this in a much younger person is even more appalling.
‘Anna Richardson: Love, Loss and Dementia’, unveils Alzheimer’s Society’s ‘Behind Closed Doors’ interactive installation on London’s Southbank
Anna met 29-year-old Jordan, who lost his mother in her 40s to dementia and now knows that he carries the same early-onset gene.
Jordan’s reaction to learning that he might have 15 good years left was inspirational.
He intends to pack a lifetime into the next decade, and began by marrying his adoring girlfriend, Anya.
This made a moving companion piece to BBC2’s portrait earlier in the week of cancer campaigner Kris Hallenga, called Living Every Second.
Kris, who died last May after being diagnosed with breast cancer at 23, staged a ‘fun-eral’, with Dawn French as the celebrant and a soul singer blasting out Sammy Davis Jr’s hit I’m Gonna Live Till I Die.
Though the young couplewere articulate, courageous and willing to discuss any aspect of Jordan’s diagnosis, Anna avoided some of the toughest questions, such as whether they wanted children.
And she failed to challenge any politicians or NHS policymakers on why, when so much money was spent on Covid hysteria, the cash isn’t available to tackle a much bigger killer in dementia.
But Anna has started theconversation. Now we have to keep talking.
