Mum and Dad were grafters who worked hard their whole lives, having met at Coppermill telephone exchange in East London, where Dad was an engineer and Mum was a telephone operator. I’ll never forget the night Dad was on call-out and took me to work with him at 2am: I got to sit on his desk and play telephone operators.

They remained in the same ex-council house in Stevenage for 58 years, but saved up to travel the world together, going to places including Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I loved being around them so much, I didn’t leave home until I was 29.

The first signs something wasn’t right

In 2018, when Mum was 78 and Dad was 87, they started acting strangely. Mum occasionally forgot where the bathroom was, or would walk out of the door and get lost on the front path of a home she’d lived in for 52 years.

Since, at that point, I lived just up the road in Bedfordshire, I spent a lot of time at my parents’, and often stayed the night. The first time I knew anything was up with Dad was when he came into my room, where I was lying in bed, urinated in the corner of the room, and then left, as if nothing had happened.

We eventually took Dad to the memory clinic, where he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. But Mum’s diagnosis of Lewy body dementia wasn’t made until 2023, the following year. 

Dad became increasingly forgetful, though to the end, he always remembered who I was. Mum had forgotten who I was in 2022 – you know that day is coming but it breaks your heart when it arrives.

Dad regressed to being a child. One evening, he put a plastic kettle on the gas hob, thinking it was a metal one from the 1940s. The kitchen caught fire and we had to call the fire brigade.

By now I had hired a private carer, Becky, who was to become a lifeline: Becky would cook meals for my parents during the week, and do the cleaning. My whole life became a spreadsheet as I worked out how I’d afford it, based on how many years my parents might live. This kept me awake at night: Mum and Dad had saved hard all their lives and the money was going so fast. In the end we were spending £14,000 a month on two carers 24/7 to care for both of them.