Mind, Body, Memory

Making sense of my brother's dementia

Abstract

Growing old isn’t just about your body coming under strain, often long before you feel the approach of death. Death arrives when it will, and the best you can do is come to terms with the prospect. But it’s not just about your own demise. Wittgenstein held the view that death is not an event in life. He should have said, in your own life, because it is in other people’s. I don’t mean the deaths you learn about in the news, innumerable victims of wars, earthquakes, floods, terrorism and murders, which affect you at a distance, but those of people you know in the flesh, your intimates, friends, associates and acquaintances. The representation of distant death is constant, but you start to feel its approach when those of your own generation begin to die, relatives, friends, people you’ve worked with, some of them older, some younger, some after falling ill, some suddenly. The last of these are the most distressing. When my eldest brother died three months after his ninetieth birthday, it was not unexpected, and it was not a shock. A few months earlier, when one of my closest friends was found dead on her doorstep by a neighbour, I experienced what Freud called the first stage of mourning, the ‘it’s not true’ with which people often greet sudden news of bereavement.