I’m very pleased to introduce long-time writing friend Ann Burnett to the blog today. Although a well-published author of non-fiction, fiction and children’s writing, Ann’s latest publication, A Last Journey, is a memoir of some of the travel adventures she shared with her husband Bill, before his diagnosis and quick progression of Lewy Body Dementia cruelly robbed them of their final years as a couple.
This is not a ‘misery memoir’ but a celebration of a well-loved husband and father, part travelogue, part a realistic account of Ann suddenly becoming her husband’s carer. It is both life-affirming and poignant, and hopefully will offer some personal insight into this devastating disease and why we should celebrate every moment of the lives we have.
A Last Journey is a touching, amusing, and heart-rending memoir from award-winning writer, Ann Burnett, on love, life and death. Dementia wasn’t what the couple expected at all, having imagined themselves doddering along till their eighties, but dementia had other ideas.
Inveterate travellers, living abroad and experiencing life in different countries, Bill now had a prognosis of eighteen months left of life. With the deterioration of her life partner of fifty-five years, Ann struggled to care for Bill, battling against bureaucracy, her own exhaustion, and an NHS suffering from austerity and the pandemic, until Bill’s death.
A Last Journey is available with photos from Lumphanan Press, or from Amazon without photos.
Thank you, Ann, for kindly sharing answers to the following questions.
What made you write this memoir?
After Bill died, I was simply concentrating on coping with my new life. I was only writing very short pieces (500 words ) for the DementiArts magazine produced by the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh and had no plans to write anything else, especially not a book. I'd been part of a PhD student's research into carers at home and she sent me the transcripts of the recordings she'd made of our discussions over Zoom (it had been lockdown when she interviewed me). There were something like 100 pages of it and it was a while before I could face reading it but when I eventually did, I realised how much I'd forgotten about events at that time. So I started jotting down bits and pieces that I remembered as and when they popped into my memory.
How important was it to recount your earlier travels together?
My memories of Bill soon went back to happier times and I began to reread the many articles and blogs I'd written about our travels and life experiences. Further digging into the cupboards found letters I'd written to my mother from overseas (she'd kept them all) and the diaries Bill and I had written when travelling. Gathering all this stuff together I realised that I had the makings of a book.
How difficult was it to decide what to include?
I wanted to give a rounded picture of Bill as, when he was ill, the medical staff only seemed to see this poor old man and didn't know him as he'd been. One of the first things I did when we started the rounds of hospitals and consultants was to print out a brief summary of all the things he's done in his life, his interests and achievements, to hand over to all the staff we came across.
It gave me the idea for the Hidden Lives page I write for the DementiArts magazine - to tell the story behind the old person and boy, do they have interesting lives!
For the book, I simply included incidents and experiences that were unusual or funny or were typical of where we were. I felt there was enough sadness to come in the book that it was important to lighten the atmosphere somewhat.
How much support did you have in Bill’s latter days?
I managed to keep Bill at home with the help of carers coming in twice a day to get him up and put him to bed again at night but it was only in the last few weeks of his life that he had to go into hospital as he could no longer stand or walk and was extremely frail.
You have a down to earth sense of humour – did that help?
We both had a sense of humour, a sense of the absurd which kept us going throughout our lives. And with my support group of people who have been through similar circumstances, the black humour, typical of everyone involved in traumatic experiences, can be very helpful in getting you through darker moments in life.
How do you think this book might help others going through a similar situation?
I don't know about helping others but writing the book certainly helped me. It forced me to revisit the past, all of it, and helped me to come to terms with it. Yes, I cried buckets writing it and still cannot read parts of it without tears but I feel I have brought Bill back to life in my memory and can look back on our life together with a great deal of happiness and comfort.
Thanks again, Ann. I very much enjoyed your book launch and could see some of the support you have had. I’m sure many readers will appreciate your honesty in sharing the good and bad. One piece of advice you were given has stayed with me: Never say you are fine when asked.
About Ann
I've always written but it wasn't until I was at home with my first child that I joined Ayr Writers Club and began to learn the craft. I wrote Postman Pat stories every week for a children's comic, as well as the annuals, I was a scriptwriter for the BBC children's TV and radio programmes and I wrote loads of articles and short stories.
When the internet took off, I wrote online articles for travel sites, content for content mills and turned my attention to self-publishing. I published a collection of articles I'd written for a now defunct magazine about growing up in Glasgow as A Scottish Childhood and a selection of children's stories from my time as a BBC scriptwriter, where the reader could draw their own illustrations, A Drop of Rainbow Magic. And I tried my hand at novel writing too.
I thought my writing life was over when Bill was ill and I wasn't writing at all but I have my writing mojo back again, thanks to writing my memoir, and I'm enjoying writing again.
A wonderful tribute to Bill and your marriage in spite of all the heartbreak,