Ruth opens up about her ‘living bereavement’
Ruth Langsford with her father Dennis
In a moving interview with HELEN McGURK This Morning presenter and Alzheimer’s Society ambassador Ruth Langsford talks candidly about her father’s Alzheimer’s and why she is hoping a charity event in March will raise much needed awareness of the condition
BUBBLY television presenter Ruth Langsford confides there’s never a day when she visits her dad Dennis, who is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s and in full-time residential care in Surrey, that she doesn’t cry most of the way home.
‘‘I never cry in front of him, I just chat to him, I don’t want to upset my mum, but whenever I leave I cry.
‘‘You just look at this shell of a man and think that’s not my dad. Physically it’s my dad, but it’s not the dad I remember and love and know, the fun guy.’’
Dennis recently turned 85 and he and his wife June celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary last week, but according to Ruth, her beloved dad was oblivious to both events.
‘‘It’s lovely and sad all at the same time, because actually that man sitting in the chair in the care home is not the man my mum married, and that’s what’s so heartbreaking.
‘‘We went to see him for his birthday last week and he wasn’t having a great day. It was almost like the elephant in the room, my sister was there, she had baked a birthday cake and I had the camera and we took balloons, but it was very odd because he was very unresponsive.’’
Ruth says she’s not sure if her dad still recognises her.
‘‘I’d like to say he does, my heart says that, but my head says I don’t think he does. There used to be flickers. But there was always a recognition with my mum, I don’t know whether it’s her voice, but he always seemed to perk up when she was there.
‘‘But then every so often when I think he doesn’t know it’s me, he thinks I’m just a nice lady that brings him chocolate, he looks right into my eyes, really deeply, like he’s thinking, I know her from somewhere and then sometimes he winks at me - he used to do that a lot, my dad, he was very cheeky and then I have that little moment where I think maybe he does know me.’’
Ruth describes Alzheimer’s as like a ‘‘living bereavement.’’
‘‘We’ve had that for many years now because we have lost him, he is definitely not the man that was in our lives, but then there he is physically sitting there in front of you. so our job now when we visit him is to try and communicate as best we can. It gets harder and harder and for some people they just can’t bear to visit because they find it just far too distressing.’’
She adds the hardest decision for any family affected by dementia, is when you realise your loved one needs to go into care.
‘‘Actually the decision mostly comes because you can’t physically cope anymore. There’s one thing caring for somebody and being their carer, but there also comes a point when you have to accept, I’m not a nurse and this person needs medical help.
‘‘My dad needs nursing 24 hours a day and my mum couldn’t provide that for him, she would have just gone on until she killed herself, it was making her ill.
‘‘It’s a terrible decision for any family to make and you never stop feeling guilty about it, there’s never a moment when you visit where you don’t think this is all wrong he should be at home with us, but we can’t physically do that.’’
Ruth, who is married to Belfast-born television presenter Eamonn Holmes, is a passionate ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society and will be guest of honour at a charity fundraiser in March, the Blooming Posh Tea Party at the Culloden Hotel.
Her father was diagnosed with the illness 13 years ago, but there were indications something wasn’t quite right, long before that.
‘‘I would say for a good year before he was diagnosed we were all starting to suspect. My dad was an Army man, a place for everything and everything in its place, but then he started doing odd things like he couldn’t find his slippers and we found them in the fridge and he lost his camera and we found it in the shed and he never, ever would have done that.
‘‘I remember saying to my father once ‘are you going mad, what’s the matter with you?’ and now I think I can’t believe I said that to him because actually he was ill, but we didn’t know he was ill and he didn’t know he was ill. Now I look back I think he got really odd about certain things and I wish now that we had looked for help earlier.’’
Ruth describes the emotional rollercoaster of receiving the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
‘‘At the time I still think we weren’t sure what we were dealing with, so it was almost a relief to know that’s why he has been behaving so strangely, but then we didn’t really know what Alzheimer’s meant and what it was going to involve, so then I think we felt a bit lost really.
‘‘You are more or less given this diagnosis and left to get on with it, and I think you end up having to find the help yourself, although having said there are lots of primary care trusts now who are very good and my mother had very good health workers, but in a lot of cases we hear of people who are very much left to their own devices.
‘‘You are frightened and you are confused and you don’t know what it means and, to be honest, if somebody had said to me at the very start how bad my father might get, I think it would have upset us so much - so maybe in a way you don’t want to know absolutely everything.
‘‘The Alzheimer’s Society pointed my mother towards a support group who used to meet once every two weeks, and that was enormously helpful for her, because you realise you are not the only person dealing with this. It was a life-saver for her.’’
Ruth had never spoken publicly about her father’s illness until 2007, during a studio discussion on This Morning, when she broke down on air talking to a caller about Alzheimer’s.
‘‘I felt this great lump in my throat, my voice broke and I started to cry and Eamonn, in true brilliant Eamonn fashion, managed to crack a joke - I think I said it and he rubbed my back as if to say ‘well done’.’’
Ruth was deluged by emails and letters from viewers with similar stories. The Alzheimer’s Society approached her initially to offer support, then to ask her to be an ambassador for the charity.
She says her involvement with the charity has been very worthwhile and rewarding.
‘‘I just feel that I am doing something to help - if you can even just talk to one person about your experiences and help them in any little way, like people did with us, then that is a good thing.’’
Alzheimer’s, thought to affect 17,700 people in Northern Ireland, begins with short-term memory loss, clumsiness and problems with communication, and gradually robs sufferers of their faculties, leaving them unable to remember close family or perform even the simplest tasks unaided.
Ruth emphasises the importance of early diagnosis.
‘‘Now I look back and think if only we had known about Alzheimer’s and dementia, we might have realised. I think getting an early diagnosis is so important, not because it means you get a cure, because as we know there is no cure, but it means that you start to deal with it and know how to deal with.
‘‘I would always say to people you know your loved one more than anyone else, more than a doctor - obviously they know the medical side, but in terms of their personality and their personal traits, you know them best, and if somebody is doing something that is totally out of character that’s when I think you need to go and seek help.
‘‘Don’t leave it, go with your gut instinct which is usually right. If they are doing things that are out of character, if they stop shaving, if they get very agoraphobic and never want to go anywhere where they were once the life and soul of the party, then go and seek help. Talk to your GP first. Don’t be told it’s just old age, and if you are not happy asked to be referred somewhere. If you have any suspicion that might be what it is, you might be right, so don’t wait. And if you are wrong then that’s great.’’
She adds: ‘‘The other thing I say to people is talk to that person, even if they have lost communication, as if they can understand everything you say, because we don’t know they can’t and I would hate to think that I would sit talking about my dad as if he’s not there or talking to him like he’s a child when he might be able to understand everything, he might just not be able to communicate back.
‘‘I tell him about everything, I take pictures of the dog and I tell him what Jack (her son) is up to and I just talk at him really because I think he just might understand it all.’’
Of course, as she points out Alzheimer’s doesn’t just affect older people.
‘‘People are getting younger, we have cases of people in their late forties, early fifties with Alzheimer’s. We had somebody on This Morning very recently and he was only 52, it’s tragic.’’
Ruth admits she also struggles with the ‘‘role reversal’’ element of the illness.
‘‘It’s horrible, it’s like you become the adult, and they are like a child. My dad can’t feed himself anymore, so when we visit we give him his lunch or whatever and that’s hard for us all, because you are feeding your dad like a baby, and you think this is all round the wrong way, but you do what you have to do.’’
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Friday 25 May 2012
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viv52
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 11:33 PMMy mum had same she looked at me one day and said i wonder where Vivienne is ( thats me) i said god knows where she is and mum said your right as i was a bit of a monkey ( not a bad one) when younger . That was a sad day for me she called one of the carers Vivienne one day as she looked a bit like me now that was nice. Its such a terrible illness. Iknow a lot of people who had it and thet were people who used there brains a lot daily with the job they did does anyone else find that?
helennash
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 09:41 PMHeartbreaking and sadly all too common. Lost my father last May to vascular dementia age just 69. He was only ill for 18 months but it was like a lifetime for my mother and the rest of our family. He'd never been poorly in his life but this was a tragic and abrupt end. Let's hope there's more awareness an early diagnosis for dementia sufferers and more help for family struggling to come to terms with the loss of a loved one - months or years before they pass away. I tried to get initial help through a bereavement counsellor but they don't provide support until someone has died even though families are grieving way before that. We had to fight all the way for the care we got which sadly only finally came on a permanent basis two weeks before he died. Stay strong and good luck with everything.
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