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If dementia were a country, it would boast the world’s 15th largest economy; the WHO puts global dementia costs at $1.3 trillion a year.
That makes dementia bigger than Mexico and a significantly larger economy than the Netherlands, Turkey or Switzerland.
A small portion of this staggering figure is attributed to medical costs, a third to social care. But an overwhelming chunk of it, half, is the cost of those caring for parents or partners with the illness. Global informal care for dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease International told me, is estimated at 133 billion hours annually, or “The equivalent of 67 million full-time workers”.
I’m one of them. You might be too.
I never thought about dementia until I had to. And I didn’t have to until my mother presented with the unmissable symptoms of Alzheimer’s Disease.
For ‘unmissable’, read: she forgot I was her daughter. “Tell me”, she asked one day, “When did we first meet?”
When I cast back now, when I really think about it, there had been signs, lots of signs, little, subtle, sustained signs—dropped words, confused geography, a blank look when I referenced old friends. But I dismissed these lapses, the sweetly fluffy, entirely excusable, patchy memory of old age: ‘senior moments’, I told myself.
Did I do this consciously? No. I didn’t. Really.
I think I did because I had never met dementia before, had never had the conversations around it nor cause to know what it looked like, what it sounded like. (You do need to know a thing to recognise it. Especially dementia; it whispers its way into a life).
And I was too afraid to ask, scared that asking about a thing would summon it into being: Tempting Fate.
Too late: it was already there. Here.
According to several surveys, Dementia has overtaken other major so called ‘dread’ diseases in fear factor: if you’re over fifty, and I am, chances are you’ll be more afraid of succumbing to dementia than cancer or diabetes. Why? Well, it’s obvious why: both of those can be caught early, controlled. Even cured, if you’re lucky.
Dementia can’t be. Not yet.
It isn’t a country. Dementia. Of course it’s not. But it is, as the writer Suzanne Finnamore wrote in an Opinion piece at the New York Times, ‘the place where my mother lives’. My mother lives there too. It’s a place whose topography is wrought quite differently from where I live. It takes considerable navigation skills and remarkable patience, empathy and time to find my way around it, to keep up with my mother’s changes even as she vanishes into it.
I battle to understand her new landscape to understand her. I know I need to know my way around whilst doing everything I can to avoid ending up there myself.
Even if somebody does every three minutes.
