Four Umbrellas: A Couple's Journey Into Young-Onset Alzheimer's

By June Hutton and Tony Wanless

A writing couple searches for answers when Alzheimer's causes one of them to lose the place where stories come from — memory.

At the age of fifty-three, Tony walks away from a life of journalism and into an unknown future. June is forty-eight, a writer and teacher, and over the following decade watches as her husband changes — in interests, goals, and behaviour — until Tony has a fall, ending the life they had known.

A diagnosis is seven years away, yet the signs of Alzheimer’s are all around. A suitcase Tony packs for a trip is jammed with four umbrellas, a visual symbol of cognitive looping. But how far back do these signs go? The couple starts probing the past and finding answers. This is not an old person’s disease.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Oct 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781459747807

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Reviews for Four Umbrellas

[Elizabeth Mellen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an interesting, thought-provoking, and educating premise. The execution was a little rough, which I would've probably put off to an inexperienced writer, had it not been for the fact that she had written other books, so I wonder if the personal nature of the content made the writing much more difficult than having some distance. She's correct that I can't imagine going through it with a spouse, though I watched my Grandmother deal with it (and I was not her caretaker, nor did I have expectations of her as a partner) and it definitely got me thinking a lot about when Alzheimer's begins - I know we saw that with my Grandma, there were a few years where we sort of felt unease at things that she was doing and saying, but she could still pass the tests or carry on conversations with visitors that you didn't know contained false truth without knowing much about what was actually going on in her life. She wasn't diagnosed yet when she couldn't learn my newborn daughter's name. Or when she started thinking people had been in and done things in her apartment. I think this sort of story is important to share so that people are aware of symptoms and the time it takes before someone is changed far enough to get a diagnosis - she mentions how her previously sharp, clever husband tested "average" and so was considered "fine" when average was a decline for him.