Mary Claire was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer and dementia on the same day. Afterwards she told her family: “This is what’s known as a double whammy.” Good Morning Britain presenter Richard, 63, said: “All of us were agreed on one thing from that moment. We hoped the tumour would get her first. In fact that’s what my mother told me on the phone that night. ‘I want to die as me,’ she said simply. Mum lived for another two years. By then, she had ceased to know me as her son and called me Bailey, her brother’s name. ‘You’re my kid brother, aren’t you?’ she’d say whenever I visited her, as often as I could considering she lived in Norfolk and I in London.
“She phoned me one hot July evening to ask: ‘Is it Christmas this weekend? Are you coming?’
“But with daily visits by a carer she was fundamentally functional.
“If I was taking her to lunch, I’d call to remind her in the morning and when I arrived, she’d be sitting in the kitchen in her hat and coat, make-up applied, hair neatly brushed. But the house lights were always off, even on the darkest days. She’d be sitting there in the shadows, like a ghost.”
Yesterday TV favourite Richard, who has been married to Judy Finnigan, 71, for 33 years, chaired the Alzheimer’s Society annual conference in London.
And offering fresh hope to delegates he said: “I think we are moving towards the same place where we now stand with HIV – a multi-targeted approach that will eventually make dementia a liveable, survivable illness.”
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