I created the perfect book for my dad with dementia

Many people start to spot a change in their loved ones during Christmas festivities. When it happened to Matt Singleton, an expert in ageing, he was able to do something about it...

- Matt Singleton

Dads are notoriously tricky when it comes to buying Christmas presents, but I was always lucky: my dad loved to read, and so every year we gave him books, which he received with great enthusiasm. Most of my childhood memories involve him sitting on a sun-drenched holiday balcony, book in hand, lost to the world. He had a particular passion for trashy US thriller novels and an inexhaustible appetite for books about football and rock’n’roll.

I took great pleasure in seeking out that read that he’d love but, in recent years, I started noticing that his presents sat unread. My stepmother, Colleen, quietly told me that he could no longer follow the stories, and, not for the first time, I felt that his world, once so filled with voices and ideas, was shrinking.

As is often the case, Dad’s condition started to become more apparent during Christmas. Perhaps it has something to do with the cherished family rituals and habits of the season, but differences in behaviour stand out more clearly. Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia in 2017 but we had already clocked that he was becoming very forgetful and his previously enthusiastic participation in conversations and celebrations had waned.

“Come on, we only did it last week. You must remember!” was a phrase we regrettably found ourselves often using. When he received the diagnosis, it felt for us, as it does for so many families around the world, as though hope was ending. We could initially only see what we would lose rather than what was still there.

Dad and I have always been close. After Mum’s death in 1986, he became the primary parent to my then 14-year-old sister, Ros, and 11-year-old me. Juggling a small engineering business and raising the two of us must have been physically and emotionally exhausting, but he was always very present for us. Car journeys to football and cricket matches became a special time for me and him.