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Grief.
Not necessarily grief for someone who has died, but grief for pieces of a shared life that may gradually become inaccessible to the person you love.
Martin has described the experience with painful simplicity.
“It’s wretched,” he said.
Few words could capture it more clearly.
When shared memories become one person’s memories
A marriage lasting decades is built from thousands of moments.
Some are enormous.
Weddings.
Birthdays.
The arrival of children.
Career milestones.
Christmas mornings.
Family holidays.
Others are so ordinary that nobody thinks to treasure them at the time.
A joke at breakfast.
A familiar argument.
A favourite restaurant.
A phrase only the two of you understand.
A look across a crowded room.
Together, those memories form the private history of a relationship.
Alzheimer’s can begin changing that history in a particularly cruel way.
Martin has revealed that Fiona can no longer recall some relatively recent events, including Christmas and New Year.
For many families, those celebrations become markers in time.
Photographs are taken.
Meals are shared.
Stories are repeated.
Everyone assumes the memories will remain.
But for someone living with Alzheimer’s, yesterday can sometimes become harder to reach than something that happened decades earlier.
That creates an extraordinary emotional imbalance for the person standing beside them.
Martin may remember a moment perfectly.
He may remember what Fiona wore, what she said or how she laughed.
But Fiona may no longer be able to travel back to that same memory with him.
A shared memory can slowly become a memory carried by only one person.
That may be one of the quietest heartbreaks of dementia.
But Fiona is still Fiona
There is something Martin desperately wants people to understand.
Memory loss does not mean the person has simply disappeared.
“I don’t want people to think she’s gone,” he has explained.
“She’s still very much with us.”
That distinction matters deeply.
Because Alzheimer’s can sometimes cause outsiders to speak about a person entirely in terms of what they have lost.
What they can no longer remember.
What they can no longer do.
What has changed.
But families often continue to recognise flashes — sometimes powerful ones — of the person they have always known.