You frequently hear people express the view that dementia is a cruel disease, and it is. Watching your loved ones lose the pieces of their identity that make them unique can be heartbreaking.
Yet in experiencing my mother’s dementia, I found a joy that we had not had in our relationship before, and I know that she felt it too. The illness brought us much closer. My relationship with my mother had been quite distant. Photographs of the two of us together when I was a baby show her cuddling me affectionately, dazzling
