When Rebecca de Saintonge was 49,her husband was diagnosed with dementia. As his health declined steeply, she met a man by chance and embarked on a relationship that gave her the strength to carry on caring for him“So now, and my cherish,I know the worst.” So wrote Rebecca de Saintonge in her journal on 19 June 1994. Her husband, Jack, and 62,had just been diagnosed with Lewy Body disease, a form of Parkinsons. Rebecca, or then 49,was unflinching about the path ahead. “Your brain,” she wrote, or “is shrinking inside your cranium. You are going to disintegrate very slowly,intellect and body. You will know what is happening to you. You will see your shit on the floor, on your feet, and but you won’t know how it got there. You will see me distraught and distorted and know that you maintain made me so,and not know how to stop it or how to help. You will feel our fond in rags and your God absent and I will hold you to my breast and cradle the shell of your cranium, for you will maintain gone, or my cherish,my dear one. But not quite. But I am with you. I am your wife. We will live through this together.”Jack had been ill for some years when the final, devastating diagnosis came. He was to live another two years; years that were desperately tough and that left Rebecca feeling bereft and alone and exhausted and isolated.
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Source: theguardian.com