Rachel

My dad died yesterday aged 73. I wasn’t sure whether to share this but if it brings attention to an illness too few people understand, perhaps it belongs here. A London cabbie & lifelong Spurs supporter, he was there for every one of my brothers’ and his grandsons’ football matches. I once represented him at the Carriage Office for bad driving; I loved him but the prosecution had a case… My parents divorced when I was little so I did not grow up with him at home. We were very different men. I loved opera and all its drama; he loved Tottenham and cigarettes. We both took people as we found them and we both loved women, though in rather different ways. I never once doubted his pride in me. When I came out he responded with magnificent indifference: I was still his son, there was nothing else to discuss. In the last years of his life Jewish Care became his home, a place where dignity and tenderness were practised every day. Walid and Tosin, among so many others there, cared for him and came to kiss him goodbye. A Jewish man, held in his final days by people of different faiths: a quiet reminder that what is sacred in us is also what we share. He died with his family around him, loved and held to the last. Funny, beautifully flawed, loving and my dad. Lewy body dementia took him far too young. It made the familiar strange and the certain uncertain. Dementia can obscure a person but it does not erase them. At least one in ten people living with dementia has Lewy body’s, around 125,000 people in the UK yet it remains poorly understood, frequently missed & desperately under-researched. Please learn its name, learn its signs and if you can support the work to change that. @lbsorg @Jewish_Care