SHE WAS SLIPPING AWAY FROM ME BUT I REFUSED TO GIVE UP

WHEN I retired in my late 60s, Pamela and I decided to try the sunshine life on the Costa del Sol. Our time in Spain was a very happy one, especially in the beginning. But it was while we were out there that something changed with Pamela, and she began to behave strangely. The girls spotted it first. Their mother was becoming more withdrawn and anxious, thinking that she was being watched or followed. After a couple of years, I reluctantly decided that we’d be better off back in Britain, where Pamela could have the best NHS care. The doctors weren’t sure what was wrong. It could have been Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or a rare type of dementia. They sent her to a hospital in London for scan after scan. In the end, they concluded that her condition was ‘unusual’ because she had a bit of everything. It became a regular thing for me to find my poor dear wife talking on the phone to a man who wasn’t there. She had the strangest conversations with this person, who existed only in her imagination. She was slipping away from me and, as I neared 80, I was finding it harder to take care of all her needs. At last, I accepted she would have to move into a care home. I went every day without fail to feed Pamela because she could no longer feed herself. I must say, the staff were pleased to see me because they were very short-handed and had too many patients to feed by hand. Several of our friends told me I was mad to go in every day when I didn’t need to, and they asked me why I bothered. I was indignant at that and told them, ‘Why wouldn’t I? I signed a contract when I married Pamela. I promised to care for her in sickness and in health, and I’m a man of my word.’ I’d always stay for two or three hours, holding Pamela’s hand and sitting with her while she dozed. One day, as I arrived with a bunch of her favourite freesias, she smiled and said: ‘If you didn’t come every day, Tom, I would be so lonely.’ To watch someone you love decline through dementia is a kind of slow torture. You lose them before you lose them, and that is what happened with my darling Pamela. When she finally slipped away, she was just 71. I remember the call from the care home, hearing the news, and thanking them for letting me know. Turning to Lucy, I said simply: ‘Your mother is dead.’ Neither of us broke down. We merely sat looking at each other as we gradually absorbed the information. Big shows of emotion are not the Moore way.