"She didn"t know me. That was the finish of my life"

Robert, aged 92, contacted me two years ago, when, as a widow, I was living alone for the initial time in my life and creating about my personal loneliness. “My wife died three months ago of Alzheimer’s illness right after 65 years of marriage, but more to the level, 72 years since we initial kissed,” he explained. “She waited all through the war for me and I for her. Loneliness, inform me about it!”

Today, reading through about the loyalty and love Timothy West feels for his wife of 50 many years, Prunella Scales, who is in the early stages of “a sort of’’ Alzheimer’s, I remembered Robert’s story. Theirs is a burden he understands nicely, for he carried it for the last six many years of his wife’s lifestyle.

Robert informed me he had met his beloved Kathleen in 1937, when he was sixteen and she was 14. “We met in the park where we lived, that is the place the younger men and women used to hang about. And from the moment I saw her I admired her. I knew I wished her to be my girlfriend. She could skate, we went dancing collectively at the nearby hop, and when it came to the last waltz and I explained, ‘Who’s taking you home?’, she explained, ‘You are.’

“Now I cry whenever I hear any individual enjoying Auld Lang Syne. I bear in mind all individuals many years, holding hands, and kissing her on New Year’s Eve. I’m just an emotional previous fool.”

Robert was referred to as up to serve in the British Army in Africa in 1942, and, as soon as he had parted from Kath, realised how deeply he loved her. “So I wrote and asked her to marry me, and we acquired engaged. I couldn’t do anything about the ring, so she went out and purchased it herself. I’ve nevertheless acquired it. It’s received tiny square diamond chips in it. We had nothing. We married in 1946, and borrowed funds from our mothers and fathers to find the £100 deposit on a small property. No furniture, it was all rationed. But from then on we had been pleased, right up until the day I misplaced her.”

_{Robert and Kathleen on their wedding day in 1946}

A double reduction, initial as her personality slowly withdrew, then when she died. Robert looked soon after her up to the end. Right after all, he pointed out, Kath had looked after him all their married existence with each other. “She was sweet, she was cuddly, she was sturdy-willed, definitely. A brilliant cook, she could make her personal outfits, she passed her driving check initial time. Then her memory started to go, so she couldn’t carry on cooking. Six many years just before she died, we were viewing the Proms collectively on tv and she turned to me and said, ‘How are we going to get house?’ And I mentioned, ‘Don’t fret, darling, I’ve got the automobile.’ But I was shattered.

“Then one horrible, horrible, terrible evening we were sitting with each other and she turned to me and said, ‘Where’s Robert?’ And that was the end of my lifestyle. Soon after all our years together she didn’t even know me.” Robert’s voice broke as he remembered that second.

As the sickness took its toll on them each, although by now he, too, was in his eighties, Robert was established to search following her and refused to let her go into a care home. “I informed the medical doctor, ‘If she goes, I go with her.’” So Kathleen remained in their loved ones house.

I asked how lonely he felt, caring for her himself. “It is lonely,” he replied, “but when you are caring, you’re so busy, getting foods, cooking it, dressing her, washing her, making an attempt to do the ironing. You’re so active striving to hold it all together. Even right after she’s gone, you don’t fully consider it in at very first, comprehend what you’ve misplaced. And the loved ones are close to you, supporting you. But they have to get on with their lives, and when they depart, that’s when it hits you. Some musicians see sounds in colour. I see loneliness as a great large mass of grey, there about you all the time.

“I keep asking myself more than and in excess of once more, did I do enough to make her lifestyle content? Was I good ample? The children say yes, I was. But by the finish I couldn’t request her. The medical doctor gave her some medication when she acquired worse, but it could have been aspirin for all the good it did her.”

Robert still has all Kath’s medical records, tracing the regular deterioration produced by her sickness, from slight memory reduction in 2006 appropriate up to the finish, six years later on, when she no longer knew him or could communicate with any individual. He has stored her dresses, coats and footwear. “I can not give them away or destroy them.”

But mercifully the recollections that come to him now in the even now of the night are not of Kath as she grew to become, her thoughts destroyed by the illness that killed her. They are of the Kath when they met and fell in love, the teenager he admired so much, and who adored him, the wonderful lady with the auburn hair that by no means turned grey, the consistent giggle, the blue-grey eyes that shone with entertaining.

Now in his nineties, he has written a poem describing his loneliness. “The rooms are empty, there’s not a sound, Sometimes I’m lost and wander all around.” But Kath is even now a presence in his existence and he expects one particular day to join her, “because beside me in her chair, she quietly waits our time to share.”

I asked him to choose his favourite recollections of her which were the happiest days they spent with each other? He couldn’t select a single. As an alternative he told me, “We had 21,500 happiest days. Each day of our married lifestyle.”

And that brings its personal message of hope to Timothy West and Prunella Scales. Whatever lies ahead of them, and the 1000′s of other individuals going through the identical tragic knowledge, even Alzheimer’s in the end cannot conquer love, or ruin loving recollections.

It’s a heavy burden. It can imply many years of challenging work, or loneliness, and a living death, as the illness takes hold and you slowly get rid of the particular person who meant the most to you. But that, too, is an illusion and it will pass.

Robert and Kath shared a deep abiding happiness, and these memories, that knowledge, that reality is nevertheless alive in his heart.

Contact The Silver Line on 0800 470 8090 or at thesilverline.org

"She didn"t know me. That was the finish of my life"