“So many of my memories now feel unattainable.”

This day was particularly bad. I was hoping that a brisk walk and some fresh air could help. Sometimes it did. But nothing seemed to completely change this strange feeling of uneasy that had housed somewhere under my chest.

When Martin came from work that evening, I tried to explain to him how I felt. Once again he suggested going to dinner at the weekend to talk about it. Again I couldn't face myself.

“I just feel like that, so … Eurgh,” I said.

In the next few days I kept going what was going on with me. I hadn't worried all the time – it came and went into waves – but I knew that even if I did something I loved, how to go a walk or cook, I could reappear at any moment. It was a way under the surface, like the muddy depths under a pond.

Deep inside I knew that I had more reason than most. My family history was littered with Alzheimer's disease. For years my biggest fear was that one day it could come for me.

The diagnosis

It was a sunny morning in May 2022 when Martin and I once again drove to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery near Russell Square in London. I was desperately anxious and nervous and kept fidgeting in my chair, while everything around me seemed so quiet and controlled. Perhaps this feeling of order was the reason why I couldn't quite believe that my life would be beaten shortly before his berths.

Martin and I sat side by side by the consultant over the desk. We made Smalltaly about the weather when I looked for stray reports or letters that could give me a look at what was coming up.

“So your results are back,” said the consultant slowly. “And yes, I'm afraid to tell you that you have an early on-on Alzheimer's disease.”

Martin and I stared at him. None of us said a word. None of us moved a muscle. The consultant's words hung in the air like a kind of core dust. We were sitting rigidly, in the suspended animation between everything that had been our life before that moment, and locked up in everything they had. My heart pounded and my head started beating as if I could actually feel and hear the blood as it is. It was all too much.

We drove down the street that we had previously driven millions of times, opened the door to the house, in which we brought our young Nat and Mackenzie (22 and 19) and sat in the front room and were tuned. Nat was gone in the army; Mackenzie was traveling with his friends. Everything was normal. But what was our alternative then? There was no plan B. that was my life now.

My new reality

There are only a few families all over this country who were not influenced by this terrible illness in any way, be they parents, partners or children.

Certainly my family had more than their fair proportion. My grandma, my mother, my father, my uncle Barry … they were all taken over. It's like a curse that comes back to claim us again and again. Let me give you a brief explanation if those among them are lucky enough not to have been touched by this disease. Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia and affects people's ability to think of things, their behavior and their ability.

In general, it starts to feel a bit confused, and then it becomes more and more difficult every day after day after day to remember things or to work in a normal way. It is by preparing plaque (as you come to your teeth when you don't brush them) around cells in the brain. After a while, the brain cells are destroyed or die and then you can imagine what happens. But when you think: “Stay, that is an old illness of an old person.” Well, you are right. According to the research of the Alzheimer Society, there are currently about one million people in Great Britain. Only 70,000 of them are under 65 and are described as “early” dementia, so I'm part of a fairly exclusive set. Although it is a set, I would have done everything to avoid it.

Lost memories

It is autumn 2023 and in front of me there is a huge bunch of old magazine and newspaper cuts at the shiny white kitchen table in our family house.

You are interviews with me from the last 40 years of my life as a television presenter and journalist. There is a picture of me in a very 90s suit, with my GMTV breakfast show co-moderator Eamonn Holmes' arm around me (who thought was a good pose?!). And there are some funny snapshots of me, everything hot and sweaty when I performed the BBC with Brendan Cole as my partner (at least for a few weeks) on the strictly come.

On the white whitewashed shelf along the kitchen wall are located between a spider plant and a candle fragrant with pomegranate. There is one of me and Martin who smiles before a film premiere. And another of us with our beautiful boys when they were small, on the beach in Dorset, where we went on vacation.

Wherever I look, there are memories. I know they're there. You have to be there … this is a home – a house that was built from memories. And yet so many of them now feel out of reach. It is like stretching out to touch them, remembering the photo shoots that I see in the magazines, or the moment when we took this photo on the beach on the wind breaks in Dorset, but exactly when I want to grasp it, the memory divides away from me. And I can't catch up with it.

And so it is now for me to live with Alzheimer's. That calls it 'you' (whoever 'you'): 'With Alzheimer's life'. Not that there is a choice. It's not like living with ugly curtains or living with loud neighbors. You can tear down curtains or move away from a loud house next door, but I can't escape Alzheimer's. It stays with me here.

Our everyday life now

Martin: While I started writing this in January 2025, Fiona needs a lot of help. It needs help to shower and brush your teeth. She can do these things physically, but cannot now think about how to do it. She can put on clothes, but cannot put it on the right path so that she needs help with putting on. She can no longer use her phone; She will look at it, but will not be able to send an SMS and don't even think about doing it.

There were also things that I had to do for them that are far worse than putting toothpaste on their brush. I would ask myself: Can it get worse, can it really get worse? But then it does. And that will be routine. I will think: “Well, I don't want someone else to do this for Fiona, so there is no option than to continue.” I just try to give her the best care that I can and so that she feels as safe as possible.

In my darkest moments I thought about what the future could have. Let's reach a point where I have to say: “Ok, we can't be finished here.” Because Fiona don't want me and the children to do the really basic things that are so unworthy? Does she have to go to a nursing home? But everything feels wrong – we are still relatively young. How could Fiona move to a nursing home intended for old people with hiking frames? In this phase of our life it feels like that, so wrong.

Sometimes Fiona makes this mask of hope that she has worn so often. She is no longer the independent woman I fell in love with, but sometimes she is as stubborn as always. Part of her is still the fiona that I always knew, but a large part of her is not.

I miss her. I miss my wife.

My life with Alzheimer's (MacMillan) from Fiona Phillips is now out