How I help Wendy to write her books

I met Wendy in 2016 after seeing a Facebook video she had made about life with dementia, writes Anna Wharton. My dad had had dementia and I found her story inspiring.

We wrote most of our first book together via WhatsApp, with Wendy typing her responses to my questions. I used references in her blog as well as letters, hospital notes and her daughter Sarah’s diaries to piece together events in her life. I’d ask her about them and each day I would get a different version. It wasn’t annoying, it just layered up more colour for me.

We started writing the second book in autumn 2020, amid lockdown, and this time we used Zoom along with WhatsApp. I did notice a decline in Wendy but as I got her brain working again, she became as brilliant as she had always been.

For the second book, I wanted to bring in the voices of her peer group, so I did Zoom calls with Wendy and her friends, which were insightful and hilarious.

The remarkable thing about Wendy is that she keeps doing things that scare her. It takes all of her batteries to be able to do an interview or give a talk. I’ve seen her suffer afterwards. For days she has these pounding headaches; she is very drained and tired.

Euthanasia is a subject she feels strongly about and I think we will end up writing about it together next.

It’s impossible to say exactly what her future holds. She has a degenerative disease but while we know what the ultimate outcome is going to be, the frustration and the gift of this disease is that you don’t know what the prognosis is.

You can only value your present moment, which is something that always comes across in Wendy’s writing.