T The Last Hours - Godspeed, Mama

I was out walking the dog when my mother rang. It was outside visiting hours. I knew at once that something was happening. I was terrified to answer the video call.

She was crying. ‘These are the last hours, she said. These are the last hours.’

And so it came. The tumour that had been discovered barely a month ago had raged through her body, dismantling her slowly, tearing her apart from the inside. When my mother showed me her face, she was wearing an oxygen mask.

Her fever was high. The doctor explained that the tumour had begun to break apart, poisoning her entire body, sending sepsis coursing through her veins.

He was astonished, he said, that she was still holding on. Her organs, her body’s condition, apart from the inflamed cancer crawling through her gut and the sly dementia in her brain, were impeccable. Even now, even like this, she was refusing to be ordinary.

I told grandma I loved her. I told her we would meet again, in several other lifetimes. I told her she was my best friend, forever and always, and that I am eternally in her debt, for saving my life when I was eight, and for saving my confidence when she paid to have my teeth fixed at thirty-four.

I told her that after this life, when I too have died and been reborn at last, I want her to be part of my new life again. Because we still have so much left to do together, and there was never enough time for everything we needed.

I saw her dementia so differently from everyone else in the family. When she was first diagnosed, I panicked.

I bought three books, written by a British woman who was herself living with dementia, and they shifted my understanding of the illness forever. I would urge anyone whose loved ones are going through dementia to read them.

They taught me not only to comprehend the progress of this formidable condition, but to see the person still living inside it, and to treat them with the dignity and tenderness they deserve, right until the very end.

Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s at 58, around the same age many of us still think of as “too young for this.” She spent the next decade writing three books that, taken together, form something like a map through the wilderness of dementia: from diagnosis, through living, to dying.

I found them not as clinical guides but as companions, the kind of voice you need when you’re watching someone you love disappear in slow motion, like my grandma did.

Her first book, Somebody I Used to Know, is a memoir of the early years after diagnosis. She writes about the creeping fog, the day she sat at her desk and couldn’t understand a computer system she’d used for years, the inexplicable falls.

But what stays with you isn’t the horror of decline. It’s her defiance. She built a memory room filled with labelled photographs of the people she loved, so that on the days the mist came down, she could sit there and feel calm. She refused to treat her diagnosis as a full stop. She called it a comma.

Reading that book changed how I looked at my grandmother. I stopped seeing only what she had lost and started noticing what she was still reaching for, a familiar face, a voice, a hand.

Even now, when she lies in the hospice and cannot speak, her eyes found me on that screen, during our last video call. It took a few seconds, but she looked for me. That is not nothing. Wendy taught me that.

Her second book, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, broke open things I had never considered. That dementia is not just about forgetting.

That the senses warp, taste changes so dramatically that a favourite cup of tea might become unrecognisable; that black can appear as emptiness, as a hole in the world; that the clatter of cutlery can become unbearable.

That everyone experiences it differently, just as everyone was different before the disease arrived.

This is the book that sharpened my instincts. When I saw my grandmother on that video call with her mouth hanging open and dry because of the drugs she received in her end of life care dulled her senses, I knew, not from medical training but from understanding, that she would hate that.

She has always hated a dry mouth. So I told my mother to ask the nurses to wet a cloth and moisten her lips and tongue, because a cup of water is no longer safe for someone who cannot swallow.

That anger I felt for this negligence, that fierce protectiveness, it came from paying attention. From learning, through Wendy’s words, that dignity lives in the smallest details, even at the very end.

Her third and final book, One Last Thing, is about dying. After her diagnosis, Wendy said all her old fears simply dissolved. What was left to be afraid of when you were already losing your own mind?

So she turned, with extraordinary courage, towards the one conversation most people avoid: how we die, and whether we should have any say in it. She wrote about advance care plans, about the paperwork no one wants to face, about assisted dying, not to persuade, but to argue that people deserve choice and agency, even at the end. Especially at the end.

Wendy died in February 2024, on her own terms, in the way she chose.

That book gave me the words I said to my grandmother in her last moments I could speak to her, being in her morphine- induced sleep. I don’t know if she understood every word. I don’t know what I saw in her eyes days before.

But I said it, because Wendy taught me that the conversation itself is the gift. That speaking honestly about death is not cruelty. It is the deepest form of kindness.

These three books did not prepare me for the grief. Nothing could. But they taught me to sit with it differently, to see my grandmother not as someone being taken from me, but as someone still here, still worthy of dignity and gentleness.

They taught me that love does not require recognition to exist. And they taught me that letting go is not giving up. It is, perhaps, the bravest thing we ever do.