My Husband's Dementia Taught Me a Valuable Lesson

One of the first changes I noticed in my husband was his golf. He always practiced but never in the light—while he was a very talented sportsman throughout his life, he didn't have a good swing.

Even if it was a wet, horrible evening, he would ask one of my daughters and me to come along and pick up the balls. Of course, we were absolutely useless because most of them disappeared into the rough.

But eventually, he stopped wanting to play with anyone. He only wanted to practice on his own.

He started driving alone, and would cannon into the odd thing, then tell whoever it was he'd cannoned into that he'd never been in trouble for driving before, and it couldn't possibly be his fault.

Before Norman's dementia diagnosis, our life was hectic. We were both journalists, with four children and then seven grandchildren. He wrote for the Scotsman newspaper as the rugby and golf correspondent, and we admired him for his humour, talent and his eccentricity.

He was a brilliant writer, and was entirely capable of staying awake for three days in a row working on a book.

When Norman's behavior started to change, I asked the doctor to tell him not to drive, but I suspect he was too scared of him. I hid the keys every night, which was terrible because I'd often forget where I put them myself.

I installed mechanisms to the oven, to ensure he didn't switch it on for more than half an hour at a time, and noticed he had started to add orange juice to the cat biscuits—which wasn't appreciated by our pet.

The doctor wanted to give him a cognitive assessment and asked strange questions about naming certain types of animals. Norman said the wrong thing, but managed to convince the doctor that the questions were so asinine that it demonstrated there was something wrong with the doctor, not with him. He was pretty outrageous.

After six years of living with dementia, Norman was waking up in the middle of the night, getting dressed, and asking for his golf clubs and his gun. He didn't have a gun, but never mind.

It was going on every night until one evening, on New Year's Eve, he disappeared when we didn't even know he was out. A neighbor found him on a pavement around half a mile away. He didn't know where he was or what he was doing.

That really was a crisis point, he had to go into a care home because we just couldn't cope. We knew he was going to have to at some point; he was a brilliant man with a great brain, but he was difficult with dementia.

I was worried sick before his first day. I brought my sister, who is a medical social worker, with me. At the time he had very swollen feet which needed to be seen by the matron. I suggested to her that it would do well to have a cake ready for him.

So, they made a very nice cake and he was very happy eating it. Still, I thought the whole thing was terrible. "How can I be doing this?" I thought.

Later that day he went up to the nurse's station, where he met a wonderful nurse called Alphonso and requested a platter of food including pate, tomatoes, and a bicycle.

"Of course, sir," said Alphonso "Give me five minutes".

Five minutes later, he came back with a cup of tea.

"That's exactly what I wanted", said Norman.

The next morning I phoned the matron and asked whether he slept. "He slept terribly well," she said. I thought he'd be making a fuss about wanting to come home, but he was fine. He didn't know where he was, but he was very happy.

After the hell I had put myself through while making the decision, to find that he didn't mind where he was, was such a relief.

From there, Norman settled in wonderfully. He had always been very keen on sport and whoever he saw he would quiz on their sporting credentials. He'd want to know what you played, when you played it, and how many goals you scored.

If anyone came in with a broken bone, he would go up to them and say: "Listen, you'll soon be back in your first team." It really was a crazy suggestion, but they all liked to hear this good news.

One day there was some kind of board meeting at the home, which Norman decided that he would join. They decided it would be more trouble to ask him to leave the room than just let him stay, so he sat there looking through all of the papers while I peeped through the crack in the door.

Everything was going fine until it came to any other business and Norman said: "Well, a fresh supply of rugby balls never arrived."

"I'll take note of that, Norman, thank you very much," said Alphonso.

I used to play piano in the care home—I'm not a pianist by any means, but I can play songs by ear, and when a piano arrived one day, I was able to reel off some tracks from the musicals.

As soon as I began to play, I looked around the room and noticed the residents tapping their feet; they each came to life like characters in a book, and it was such fun to see them.

I would often bring my grandchildren to the care home after school or nursery, and it was fun to see them interact with the residents. When I was a child, I was told to keep quiet when elderly people were around, but I discovered that these people loved to have a chat with kids.

My twin granddaughters were 11 years old at the time, and would visit everybody telling them what they were doing at school or what they'd had for lunch. There was one very testy elderly lady, who had once been a professor and always had a jigsaw puzzle of Edinburgh on her desk.

She had an annex in the corridor and my granddaughters had been advised to keep their distance from her. Typically, they didn't take any notice and went to visit her. Normally she would have sent people packing, but she needed help finding a piece of her puzzle that had fallen on the floor.

They got down on their hands and knees and found it, but while jumping up, knocked the rest of the puzzle onto the floor. The children went white, but the old lady just sat there and said: "Listen, I lived through the Blitz. I think we can get the three of us to put this right."

Another lady at the home, Betsy, was absolutely beautiful, and always dressed as if she was in a hotel. She had dementia, and her husband, Henry, absolutely doted on her. He had been a farmer and in his retirement they had gone on cruises where they took part in various dancing events and won trophies all around the world.

One day when I was playing and playing the piano, Henry moved some of the chairs and the patients out of the way to the middle of the room and he took his wife's hand and they danced their way back into the past.

Staff and residents were watching and it was so beautiful that people were either crying or clapping.

Afterward, Henry approached me, thanked me for reminding him of such happy times and asked if on the following Tuesday—his wife's birthday— I could play "Dancing Cheek to Cheek" by Irving Berlin.

Of course, I agreed and went back home excited for the following week. But when the day arrived, and they were about half an hour late, I asked the matron where Betsy and Henry were, and I found out he had died in the middle of the night.

I couldn't believe it. I asked what he died of and she said: "Well, doctors say he had a heart attack. I say he had a broken heart."

Over the two years Norman spent in the care home, I had just started writing. I have always made notes about what I saw and whatever I'd been doing, but I thought it would be fun to record everything I had seen during that time.

Then, one of my granddaughters read one of my pieces and said: "Granny, you ought to turn this into a book."

I wanted to provide a departure from the doom and gloom portrayal of care homes and instead focus on stories of dancing, laughter, and friendship that can arise from these challenging times.

For anyone in the same position as me all those years ago, I would advise finding a home where the staff have a sense of humor. People like Alphonso were absolutely terrific, he raised the mood on his own.

We can all contribute in our own way and, for me, tapping away at the piano prompted smiles I remember to this day.

Lewine Mair is an award-winning sportswriter who was married to the late rugby and cricket player Norman Mair. Her book Tapping Feet: A Double-take on Care Homes and Dementia, is available now.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

As told to Newsweek's My Turn associate editor, Monica Greep.

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