welcome to the house of laughter and forgetting
Alzheimer’s disease, the condition where your dignity often packs its bags along with your memory before vanishing into the night like deserters, is certainly no picnic. Not for the person experiencing it, and even less so for those who stand by powerlessly observing the decline of their loved one.
Just ask Helen van Breda and her husband, Mark. Shortly before her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, Helen realised with a massive shock that there was something seriously wrong with her mother.
“They were staying with us when Mark’s parents came for lunch. We were still sitting at the table when my mom suddenly jumped up and announced that she was going to watch the cricket. My mother! She would never normally leave the table while eating! Then she got lost in the house… It was only then that my father acknowledged there had been something wrong for quite a while.”
“When Helen’s mother was diagnosed, we’d never even heard of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Mark.
From then on it was a spiral of heartache, Helen recalls. “My father, then a farmer in
