During breakfast in the garden of writer Anthea Rowan’s home in Africa, her elderly mother gestures towards a lemongrass in a pot. “That plant,” she says. “What can I see beneath its feathers?” The word slippage goes unnoticed by Rowan’s husband and son. But the writer is puzzled. “Leaves, Mum. You mean beneath its leaves.”
A year later, Rowan’s mother asks her daughter: “Tell me: when did we first meet?”
A Silent Tsunami charts Rowan’s experience of her mother’s disintegration through Alzheimer’s, including the final 18 months of her life, when the author cared for her mother, until she died in her arms in Rowan’s house – so remote that the nearest pharmacy is a two-hour drive away.
[ Read Anthea Rowan's Dementia Diary series of articlesOpens in new window ]
[ Dementia: At lunchtime, my Mum knew I was her daughter. By evening, nothingOpens in new window ]
Rowan is unsparingly courageous in securing true words to describe her mother’s ever more brutal descent through the memory, word and motor skills losses of Alzheimer’s; the spatial disorientations, confusions and terrifying hallucinations that the disease ushers in; and the personality changes generated by a “crumbling” brain – the distrust, paranoia and disinhibition – so that Rowan’s once sparkling, sweet-natured mother “morphs into some shouty monster whom I cannot please or placate”.
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The cognitive dissonance and emotional pain of losing a beloved parent, who can’t remember who you are, to this ongoing erasure of who they once were; and the rigours, frustrations, exhaustions and caregiver guilt of being the chief “minder” of the sufferer as they’re swept out on the tide of dementia – these experiences are superbly rendered by Rowan’s linguistic craft.
But A Silent Tsunami is much more than a chronological personal account. Enlisting her investigative journalism skills, Rowan interviews the world’s leading dementia experts, first in a bid to understand her mother’s illness, and then – when she accepts that her mother’s brain is damaged beyond repair and deteriorating beyond prevention – in a desperate quest to learn how she might save herself from the same neurodegenerative fate.
Rowan discovers and delineates why and how her mother was on a likely track for dementia. And, contrary to what Prof Craig Richie refers to as the “endemic nihilism” among the medical community “that there’s nothing we can do about this illness”, A Silent Tsunami lay-delivers the science that shows just how much we can do prophylactically to protect our brains as they age.
