A decade ago, my father suffered alone and in misery. Why do dementia sufferers still face the same fate? | Nicci Gerrard

Launched in the Observer, John’s Campaign aims to give frail people the right to be accompanied by those who love them

Everyone has their own special way of grieving. Mine turned my life upside down.

On 26 November 2014, two days after the funeral of my father, I sent a slightly unhinged email to the Observer saying there was a piece “I want (need) to write… My very lovely and beloved father died two weeks ago, after a long and distressing time suffering from dementia. He had been in gradual decline for more than a decade but went into hospital in February, and while there seemed to go off a cliff: his deterioration was catastrophic and when he came out a few weeks later he was emaciated to the point of starvation, immobile, bed bound, incapable of stringing words together, hardly able to recognise anyone.”

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