While You're Still Here

You are grieving her. And she is sitting right there.

Nobody has died. So nobody sends a card. Nobody brings a casserole. Nobody says I'm so sorry for your loss — because as far as the world is concerned, you haven't had one.

And yet you are grieving. Every day. With your whole body.

You answer the same question for the ninth time without a sigh. You look for her behind her eyes and find a little less. You sit in the car park afterwards and cry where nobody can see, then fix your face and drive home. Someone tells you how strong you are, and it lands like a small stone.

You are not losing your mind. You are losing them — and grief that begins before the goodbye is still grief.

There are hundreds of books about how to care for someone with dementia. This is not one of them. This is for the part nobody explains: the part of you that is quietly breaking while you hold everyone else up.

Inside, gently:

• Why this grief has no ending to wait for — and why "closure" was never the goal
• The Car Park Minute — sixty seconds, three lines, before you drive home (and the Kitchen Minute, if you live with them and there is no drive home)
• The Both/And Breath — for the days you love them and cannot bear it, both at once
• The feelings nobody admits to: resentment, relief, the wish for it to be over — held without a flicker of judgement
• "But she seemed fine to me" — the relative who visits for an hour, and the loneliness of being disbelieved
• A chapter for the daughter caring for someone who hurt her long before the illness
• The sibling who doesn't come — and a page for the sibling who has been sent that chapter
• The care home: the decision, and the long months after, when everybody promised the weight would lift and it didn't
• The day they don't know you. The nights. The part nobody writes about — the intimate care.
• Written for daughters and wives, and it holds the granddaughter who is doing it because her mother can't, the only child with nobody to be angry at, and the reader who has come to this book late, after the death
• A 30-day gentle programme with no streak to break — and a lowest-capacity version of every single practice, for the days you have nothing left

Warm, secular, and never clinical. It will never tell you how to manage the illness, and it will never tell you whether to stay, to place them, or to forgive anyone. It holds one thing only: you.

You did not fail them by grieving. You loved them the whole way home.