Wendy Mitchell has died. I feel I have, too.

I rarely feel much emotion when I learn that someone I’ve known has died. This embarrasses me. I’ve never told anyone about it. Till now. I don’t know — but I suspect — this may be another sign of dementia, which I’ve felt coming on for several years, and which I detail in my book.

Yet when I opened Wendy’s daily blog post yesterday, and found myself reading that she had died (and that the post had been uploaded by her daughters), I first felt horror, then a wrenching sadness. I’d lost Wendy! In many ways she had become closer to me than anybody I knew.

Wendy taught me so much. And helped me, every day.

I don’t have much control over my feelings anymore.

Wendy Mitchell had “young-onset dementia”, and ended up writing two bestselling books about it. Rather than tell you about all that, you can learn about her by reading the obits which are all over the British media just now — The BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian. And you can google.

Wendy was British and lived in Yorkshire. People here in the U.S. don’t seem to know about her. Which is a real shame.

When someone I’ve known personally dies, I make the appropriate comments of sympathy; I send a card. To not do so, to show so little emotion, seems so awful, so callous. So unfeeling. And I know intellectually that it is. But I don’t have much control over my feelings anymore.

Wendy once wrote, “dementia has left me with 3 emotions, happy, sad and content. I can no longer feel anger and instead just feel incredibly sad and end up crying.” That’s me, to a “T”. What she wrote that day made me realize I wasn’t alone; that what was happening to me wasn’t unusual.

But this piece is not going to be about the fear and worry of having dementia. No; it is going to be about the joy and peace I felt when reading her blog posts, knowing I had Wendy as a guide. So, read on.

The minute I stepped outside and felt the morning air I was settled,” began one of her daily blog posts. It was her most frequent theme: being outside in the early morning, before sunrise. In this post, she told us that the “light and the world around looked friendlier than in the dark.

“So many magnificent trees.…and the sun just starting its assent, saying hello through the trunks of the fir trees….I could feel my body starting to relax as the nature around me began to wrap its arms around me.…” As usual, her post was a photographic itinerary of her early morning walk, with dozens of photos. Wendy was quite a fine photographer, and many of her photos ended up in calendars she sold in her village as fundraisers for dementia research. Wendy, to the end, was an activist (a “campaigner,” as they say in Britain).

She was saying that one could still live on one’s own, going about daily life, without interference.

I can never remember how I “met” Wendy. I never actually met her, of course; but when I came across her first book, Somebody I Used to Know, I couldn’t stop reading. She was describing me. The incident, the feelings. Everything. She also wrote about her fears of what would happen to her as a result of the well-meaning but totally misguided beliefs of others about “people with dementia” — which most often in people’s minds translates into “people with Alzheimer’s.” Here was a woman who understood all too clearly that the problems people face with dementia are due in large part to how they’re treated.

This was my woman! She knew — and was telling people — about how people like her could live on their own, and have a life they wanted, even “a full life” — without being managed by others.

This was the first thing that made her so comforting to me. She was saying that one could still live on one’s own, going about daily life, without interference. And her daily blog — yes, she wrote every day — detailed just what that looked like. She also made it very celar, through not just her writing but through her act of writing, lucidly, humorously, that “just because” one has “dementia” it doesn’t mean they have “lost their mind.” They (we) have lost parts of it; parts don’t work, but most parts do. The parts that make us “us” work; the self is still there. Perhaps we are “losing consciousness” in some parts, but never entirely.” The Self memains.

Wendy gave us the priviledge of sharing her daily walks — “trundles,” she called them — around her idyllic village, which seemed to me a paradise. Of course, I’d remind myself, Wendy was now wealthy from her books; she could live anywhere, and thus had plopped herself down into an idyllic village that seemed to me to be basically a big natural habitat of animals where people just happened to also live: There were horses in their “run,” heirloom cattle that wandered free throughout the village; ducks, geese, rabbits, pheasants, tortoises …

“I’d had a few bad days in a row,” she wrote once, explaining that she coped with those kinds of days “by walking miles, just me and nature for company. It had been like that for the days prior to this and I’d walked miles, just to prove to myself, I could, and also to be outside where I always feel dementia is diluted . Inside it feels oppressive .…”

Her posts took her readers along with her by means of her camera. Wendy was no slouch when it came to photography. Each post was full of the animals she saw, and greeted, each day. Her daughter and son-in-law’s dog Merlin was a great favorite who often joined her. She had robin friends (British robins are a different bird than the birds we in he States call “robins”), and one she believed was her dear friend Sylvie, come back to life.

It was her aliveness amidst all her animal friends that comforted me most. I do not have that where I live, and miss animals terribly — but through Wendy, I could share, virtually, in her relationships.

Wendy almost always walked in the very early morning, getting up while it was still dark (like I do, too, because I can’t “sleep in” either) and going forth with her camera to watch the sun rise. The morning sunrise was always her beacon, what she sought every morning.

Of one such experience, when she’d gotten herself turned around in the pre-dawn, she wrote, “I stood there trying to work out if the sun had risen, but there was too much low cloud to show its colours …I felt really confused for several minutes before deciding to carry on regardless. … [Then] for some reason I turned. I hadn’t missed it at all! There was the sparkle just appearing. Thank goodness I turned! The world felt right once more as slowly but surely, the sun began to rise…”

When I read of her joy as she saw the sun first peep over the horizon, then grow, and grow, until it spread across the landscape, I’d often find myself thinking of humans’ very long relationship with the sun, and how many ancient cultures hd worshipped the sun, named the Sun their chief god; felt it crucial for their spritual life, let alone their physical one.

I’d read of this still in indigenous cultures today; of the Diné, of N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn. And I’d always come around to what we’d lost, most of us, and what Wendy had still. Even with dementia. Perhaps, I thought, because of dementia. Dementia, I think, allows you to let go of so much. And in a way it can be a blessing, opening you to what’s left.

A blessing — were it not for the diagnoses, the assumptions, the medicalization, the structuring of a life others well-meaningly try to take away from us.

I find myself thinking of humans’ very long relationship with the Sun.

As I wrote in my book, I don’t want to have happen to me what typically happens when someone gets “diagnosed” with “dementia.” (Alzheimer’s, usually.) So I keep it to myself. The author’s name on my book, and here on medium.com, is a fake name, just in case. Like Wendy did when first diagnosed, I fear what will happen. I fear that far more than what’s going on with me now .

When I opened my morning email yesterday and began reading her daily blog post, I knew I had lost a friend. Wendy had given me a peace I’d found nowhere else.
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