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Reading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents' dementia | Jo Glanville

The Glanville family in the mid-1960sThe Glanville family in the mid-1960sReading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents’ dementiaJo GlanvilleIt was hard to communicate with my mother or father, until reading a book out loud led to a discoveryThe novelist Ian McEwan has advocated for the extension of assisted dying to people with dementia, commenting on the deeply distressing experience of his own mother: “By the time my mother was well advanced and could not recognise anyone, she was dead. She was alive and dead all at once. It was a terrible thing.

Reading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents' dementia | Jo Glanville

Credit: Theguardian

Key Highlights

  • And the burden on those closest is also part of the radioactive damage of it all.”My mother, Pamela, a journalist, died of vascular dementia 10 years ago.
  • My father, the football journalist and novelist Brian Glanville, died of Parkinson’s last year after living with the illness for five years.
  • He also had a milder form of dementia.
  • “Radioactive damage” is certainly a vivid description of the impact of caring for someone living with a degenerative illness, but the perception that someone in the last stages of dementia may be “dead” feels wrong when I think of my parents.
  • How are you to know what is happening in someone else’s brain?A great revelation for me in caring for my parents was a discovery I made through reading to them – that in some respects, their brains were unimpaired. Pamela Glanville in the 1960sBoth continued to enjoy being read to until the end of their lives.
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Sources

  1. Reading was the key to breaking through the fog of my parents' dementia | Jo Glanville

This quick summary is automatically generated using AI based on reports from multiple news sources. The content has not been reviewed or verified by humans. For complete details, accuracy, and context, please refer to the original published articles.

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