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THE ducks know Wendy Mitchell, greeting their old friend in a gentle huddle before she even opens her carrier bag of seed. “Because I come every day they remember me,” she says, beaming at the cacophony of quacking, feeding a couple of the birds from her cupped palm.
But while the ducks in the village pond know her, Wendy does not know them; at least, she can’t remember them, or doing this.
She lives with a combination of Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, diagnosed in 2014 when she was just 58.
We are at the start of a walk around her village, aptly named Walkington, in East Yorkshire, which she usually repeats two or three times a day. Yet, like the duck feeding, in this moment it is as new for her as it is for me.
These “trundles” give her autonomy, essential to the strict routine she has adopted that helps her continue to live independently (along with frequently pinging alarms on her phone and Alexa).
In place of her “memory”, she always slings a camera around her neck, snapping landmarks, birds, animals, trees (often the same ones) so when she gets home she can reflect on what she’s done.
It sounds like a perpetual Groundhog Day – only for Wendy, it isn’t. Her pedometer has been known to read 28,000 steps, but while each might feel familiar, it’s always a first.
“Yes, every time, the walk is new,” she nods, brightly. “I don’t remember feeding the ducks yesterday. I know I did, whether it was rainy or sunny I don’t know, or if they came to me straight away like this.
“Once I start up it feels familiar, but every day I’m feeding them for the first time. I never get bored.”
When we return in an hour, she will admit only knowing she has fed the ducks because her bag is empty. But her fresh eyes, the ability to enjoy things anew, are dementia’s “blessings”, she insists.
“I live in the moment. The moment is the only thing we all have for certain. You can learn a lot from people with dementia,” she says.
Wendy, 65, once a super-organised NHS manager with “a photographic memory”, has made a vocation of educating on the disease.
Her first book, Somebody I Used to Know, was a bestseller, and her second, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, written with ghostwriter Anna Wharton, is out now.
As we walk (“My legs just seem to know the way and I let them go”, she explains) Wendy admits she hasn’t always been able to see the positives.
Her diagnosis in 2014 was harrowing, and she became depressed. The single mum and her two grown-up daughters knew nothing about dementia.
“The process is so negative, it focuses on what you have lost. They say there is nothing you can do and you’re discharged. I was just waiting to die.”
Testament to her strength she pulled herself up, mainly for her daughters.
Of course she has bad, “foggy” days
I can’t say enough how lucky I am. Never give up on yourself...
when she cannot go out, clinging to the sight of her window boxes from bed. This morning wasn’t good.
“Every morning I play Scrabble and Solitaire, and if I can only make twoletter words, like today, I know it’s a bad morning,” she says.
But so articulate is Wendy, so fiercely independent – she insists her daughters don’t visit every day – it is only the sporadic pauses to find a word that alert me to her dementia.
But it affects her in so many ways. Dementia is not just about memory.
A surprising fact: she no longer gets hungry or thirsty. She eats and drinks only as a function, setting reminders.
Her taste has changed too. Her
WENDY MITCHELL ON EMBRACING DEMENTIA
ved cup of Yorkshire Tea is flavourto her now. he needs familiarity, so eats the same l every day for weeks. Currently it’s pie. ut Wendy struggles to use a knife fork, and even to see pale food on a te plate. ementia has played with her ight. Anything black, for example, look like a void.
She has hallucinations. “Joyfully” she has seen her late father. And olfactory hallucinations, too. Once a smell of smoke in the se convinced her there was a fire. er hearing is also affected and loud es can “physically hurt”. ut as we walk towards the church, she stops when she hears a robin. She can name the birdsong instantly; this is an “old memory”. The past is still clear to her, it comes to her in dreams.
We pause for 10 minutes for a picture.
Later I remark on how many robin photos she will have. “Have I?” she replies, eagerly.
We loop round, today avoiding a field route. Paths she knows will lead back home, in the fields she has become lost.
It’s the outline of a row of cottages she clings to, the sound of shrieks in the school playground.
Everyone says hello. Wendy replies happily, but explains: “I haven’t a clue who people are.” Worn out, she will need to head home after this to sit in silence, eyes closed. It’s a strange feeling to know she won’t recall me or our walk.
“But I will remember the emotion of you,” she assures me. “I will know I met someone with a smiley face.”
She now has, she says, only three emotions: happiness, contentment and sadness. She insists she is lucky as others can be left with anger, jealousy. And what about fear?
Wendy doesn’t have any of it – “another blessing”, she explains.
She once “didn’t like rollercoasters”, but since her dementia, she has been skydiving. “I’ve now seen an advert for wingwalking,” she adds with a twinkle.
She continues: “I can’t say enough how lucky I am. You must never give up on yourself. Don’t underestimate what you can achieve, even at your lowest.”
At her front door her sharp eyes spot one final thing. My bag in her porch.
It is me that has forgotten it, me who doesn’t have the sharply trained eyes to spot it. Wendy laughs heartily.
What I Wish People Knew About Dementia by Wendy Mitchell is published by Bloomsbury.