Bride’s dementia tragedy
Newlywed Becky had everything going for her until she was struck down with dementia
JUST a year and a half ago she was a full-of-life ski instructor zipping around the slopes, teaching wellto-do families to ski at a luxury resort in Verbier, Switzerland. The 32-year-old was also newly married to the man of her dreams and looking forward to buying a home and starting a family.
Becky Barletta had her whole life ahead of her – until it all came crashing down with one devastating diagnosis: dementia – a disease that usually only strikes people twice her age.
Now Becky is a shadow of the energetic, vivacious young woman she used to be. She spends her days blowing raspberries, putting objects in her mouth or wandering into people’s houses whenever she can give her carers the slip.
She needs round-the-clock care and has been given just five years to live.
Her rapid deterioration has stunned her family and doctors alike – Becky is the youngest case of dementia her specialists have seen.
“There have been so many tears since then,” says her dad, Allan Sharples. “She was so young with the whole world at her feet. She’d just got married and hadn’t even been on honeymoon.”
The first signs of Becky’s cruel condition, frontotemporal dementia, appeared in the months before she got married to fellow ski instructor Luca Barletta in October 2015. Her family and friends didn’t pay heed, putting her erratic behaviour down to wedding jitters.
First she started an obsessive exercise regime, running almost compulsively. Initially her family thought she just wanted to look good for them but then there were other changes too, her sister Sophie recalls.
“She started behaving oddly with clients on the slopes and not looking after them as well as she’d previously done.”
After the wedding things got worse, Allan says.
“She began to talk inappropriately to clients, saying she wanted to be pregnant and talking about periods,” he says. “It was all done in an anti-social way that was out of context.”
Eventually Allan and his wife, Caroline, from Suffolk in the UK, flew out to Verbier to check on their daughter.
“When we saw her we knew things weren’t right,” says her father, a retired owner of several bakeries. “We had to bring her home. A week after we came back from Verbier we felt maybe she’d made a bit of a recovery.”
Still, they wanted her to see a doctor but Becky refused – she was frantic to get back to Luca and the job she loved.
“She went back for one more week’s ski instruction, but that soon fell apart,” Allan says.
THEIR daughter’s symptoms were chillingly familiar for the couple.
Caroline’s brother, James, and cousin, Phillipa, had both been struck by a rare form of dementia and had died in the past 10 years.
Early onset dementia runs in the family: James, who Allan and Caroline had cared for before he passed away four
years ago, was in his fifties when he was diagnosed. Phillipa was in her forties.
Fearing the worst, Becky’s parents took her to specialist Professor James Rowe, who’d diagnosed her uncle’s condition.
When brain scans were done the damage was terrifyingly clear – and things would only get worse.
Luca, who accompanied Becky’s family on all her appointments, hasn’t been handling things well, according to Allan.
The young couple had been married only a few months when the disease started taking its toll and Luca can’t accept that there’s no cure or treatment for it, Allan says.
Becky met Luca in New Zealand four years ago on an advanced skiing instructor course. They fell in love and travelled to India, then worked in an orphanage in Nepal.
The lovebirds had planned to buy a home together in Verbier and start a family.
Luca still works as a ski instructor in winter and manages a hostel in the Italian Alps in summer, but he makes regular visits to Suffolk to see Becky.
“To be a mom was all she ever wanted,” her sister, Sophie, says.
Sophie Gilbert (30), a mother of two, is terrified that the hereditary disease – about one in three people with frontotemporal dementia has a family history of the condition – might not be done with her family.
“I’m living with the fear that I or my children might get it, so to watch my sister’s deterioration is a daily reminder of how cruel this illness is.”
FOR now the family are rallying around their beloved Becks and trying to make her life as normal as possible.
Allan sticks to a daily routine with his daughter, taking her to buy sushi for lunch from a local grocery store.
“She used to love it before she got dementia and it’s something that’s stuck with her,” he says.
Sophie often takes her sister out for walks as well, but admits it can be quite heartrending.
“It’s not because I’m embarrassed but because I find it so sad to watch,” she says. “Some people are amazing and they chat with her but then there are others who don’t understand because she looks well from the outside, so they can be quite short with her.
“I stand there and think, ‘If you had the honour of meeting Becks when she was well then you wouldn’t be so quick to judge’.”
‘It’s not because I’m embarrassed but because I find it so sad to watch’