Helen Bach Column: Time flies...

Apologies for the rather melancholy tone, but it's five years since my Dad died.

I can't quite believe it somehow, but it's a fact. Although in fairness, we'd lost him already to a combination of Alzheimer's and vascular dementia. It's totally true when they say that you lose a loved one twice if they have that dreadful disease.

The person that you knew and loved gradually fades before your eyes and you're left with the shell of what they used to be. I think what shocked me in the end was how quickly Dad died after he went into emergency respite residential care.

I'm also haunted by the fact he used to ask us every time we visited if we'd come to take him home. The sad truth is that he'd got to the stage where he was no longer safe at home as he would wander off in the middle of the night, and there were times when he no longer recognised us and would ask who the old lady upstairs was - it was my Mum, his wife of over 50 years, and he didn't know her.

I'll be honest, five years on and I'm still grieving. Is that normal? I really don't know. But I walk alongside the grief now, sometimes it overwhelms me, but most of the time it's just there, like a nagging feeling I just can't shake.

Coincidentally, it's almost five years since the first of the dreaded Covid-19 lockdowns. We'd just managed to have Dad's funeral before our whole world shut down. I remember having a discussion with my GP about this, and how I was feeling, and his take on it was that I'd been denied the right to grieve properly. We couldn't meet people, and talk, and interact like normal humans any more.

I appreciate that at the time the Government and their advisers thought they were doing the right thing. I'm just not sure they considered the damage they were causing to people's mental health while trying to protect their physical wellbeing?