Presence of mind

‘It’s hard to know how to tell this story,’ she said as she began. ‘Because it’s so loaded. It’s so heavy-duty.’ Lore Wolfson was talking about the death of her husband, Paul, or rather about the onset of the illness that led him a year later to take an overdose of heroin, aged 61. He had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, in a peculiarly aggressive form, rapidly losing his words, his memory, his capacity to work or function independently. Lore began recording her conversations with Paul very soon after they knew for sure why he was having word-finding difficulties. ‘It was the natural thing to do,’ she said, because she’s a radio producer and, for her, keeping an audio diary was more natural than writing things down. It was also, she now says, ‘a way of keeping Paul’s voice with me’.

Lore’s Story (Radio 4, Monday night) does sound in outline very ‘heavy-duty’, but as told by Lore and through Paul’s own words it was anything but heavy-laden. They go on holiday to the far north of Scotland, taking the night train and travelling first-class. Something Paul had always wanted to do but never done. The illness had begun to take hold of his mental functioning, and Paul knew by then ‘he was going somewhere unknowable’, but he was determined to enjoy it.

Paul was a psychiatrist and understood, with perhaps too much clarity, exactly how his illness would progress. He tells Lore that sooner rather than later there will be a sudden change and ‘my brain will stop working very well. My face will become different. And I won’t really have much of a memory left.’ It all sounds so very bleak (and especially because Paul’s first wife had spent years in a care home suffering from the degenerative condition, Huntington’s disease).