Leaving a gift in your will to fund dementia research and support people here and now

Both my parents had dementia at the time of their deaths. My dad was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease and fairly quickly developed dementia.

His behaviour became so disorientated that it really wasn’t safe for him to be living at home, so he went into a nursing home and died in 2002. 

My mum had numerous stays in hospital – I have records of at least 25 admissions – with infections that often triggered delirium.

This made diagnosis of her dementia more difficult, but we reached the stage where we had professional carers coming in four times a day to help me with taking care of her personal needs, until she died in early 2020.

Here and now 

I had no connection with Alzheimer’s Society during the time my parents were alive. But after my mum’s death, I was doing all the inevitable paperwork, and I thought I should update my will.

I don't come from a large family and it just seemed, given the experiences I’ve had, that Alzheimer’s Society was the obvious destination that I would like the money to go to. 

I think the Society struck me particularly because it’s got this two-pronged approach. It’s funding research, which is so important for the future, but also supporting people here and now who are going through dementia, and the people who are looking after them. 

Really important 

I think it’s really, really important that people have access to good, reliable, authoritative information, so that when things are happening to them and their loved ones, there’s somewhere they can go to find out more about the situation they’re in. 

If you go to Amazon and type in ‘dementia’, you get books saying that they offer a cure for Alzheimer’s. But there’s no science behind it – it’s giving people false hope.

The Society is providing dependable facts, which is really important. 

In the future I hope for better diagnosis, better treatment, a cure and maybe the ability to prevent dementia in the first place. I know that’s going to be incredibly difficult, but I believe that one day it will happen.