Towards the End, Mummy's Mind Was Like Lace ... Solid Bits and Big Gaps Held Together with Fragments of Her Memory ; Just Four Days After Her Mother's Death, Angela Rippon Pays Loving Tribute to the Woman Who Shaped Her - and Describes Her Despair As She Witnessed Her Mental Disintegration

Summary

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It was an eventuality for which Angela Rippon had been mentally preparing herself. Nonetheless, when it finally happened it was every bit as heartbreaking as she had feared. The television presenter's mother Edna had been suffering from dementia for five years. After her diagnosis, Angela effectively became her carer until she was so weak she had to be moved into a home.

A fortnight ago Edna, increasingly fragile, developed a throat infection that meant she could no longer swallow. She slipped into unconsciousness and died five days later, at the age of 88, with her daughter by her side.

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Towards the End, Mummy's Mind Was Like Lace ... Solid Bits and Big Gaps Held Together with Fragments of Her Memory ; Just Four Days After Her Mother's Death, Angela Rippon Pays Loving Tribute to the Woman Who Shaped Her - and Describes Her Despair As She Witnessed Her Mental Disintegration

'I brushed her hair and rubbed cream into her hands,' says Angela. 'My mother always looked immaculate. She liked her nails done and she had stunning thick hair. I didn't want her to have an undignified end - she would have hated that.

'I'm told the hearing is the last thing that goes so I kept talking to her, about walking in the Moors and holidays we'd been on.

'She was hallucinating and thought my late father was there. She went downhill drastically. The doctors had given her morphine. But she was smiling and in a ha...

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