People tell me they don’t know how I cope. I say, ‘I don’t. Sometimes I throw up my hands and scream, ‘I am defeated by dementia!’

Most of the time you can still talk to mum and hold a conversation. It’s true you can have this same conversation over and over again but still, she is capable of having opinions and grasping logical ideas. She is for example very interested in the upcoming elections.

But then, suddenly you find yourself in the midst of a complete communication breakdown. It’s like there are these little whirlpools in mum’s mind where narrative logic breaks down. The first times it happened I got incredibly frustrated, ‘So thoughtless!’ I ranted to myself. ‘So selfish!’

The second time, it happened I got so angry I thought I was going to give myself a stroke, I swear I felt something pop in my brain. ‘So thoughtless! So selfish! Can’t she see this is stressing me out? Can’t she see that I’m really tired? Doesn’t she care?’ I tried to reason with her and it was like talking to a brick wall.

But I’ve realised, there’s absolutely no point in getting my knickers in a twist. Dementia’s like being on a boat that’s sailing peacefully down the river, going with the flow as it were. Then for no apparent reason, the boat ceases to go forward. Instead it’s caught in a whirlpool, going round and round and round. And it’s like that with mum, she gets these little whirlpools in her brain and she just can’t think beyond them.

For my own sanity and well-being, I have to learn to recognise when we hit one and learn to walk away without losing my cool. Because it’s quite clear, these whirlpools are only going to increase.