Wendy Mitchell was a quiet and reserved rota manager at a hospital in Leeds when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014 at the relatively young age of 58.
Known as the “office guru” for her encyclopaedic memory — she could recall the schedules of a hundred or so nurses on her ward — she was a meticulous and tightly wound single mother who was afraid of animals and the dark, and had difficulty opening up to others. “The only person I could rely on was me,” she said.
Over time, losing her memory would, in some ways, bring her greater freedom and contentment. “So many people say, ‘Aren’t you worried about what will happen?’” she said a decade later. “But what do I have to be worried about? I’ve faced my biggest fear. There’s nothing else to be afraid of.”
For the first six months, however, her life was upended. She concealed her diagnosis at work and structured her days through reminders on Post-it notes strewn across her floor. When she informed her managers of her condition they suggested she take early retirement, but she decided that to stave off the increasing gaps in memory she needed to stay active.
• Dementia campaigner announces her death in posthumous blog
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She attended meetings for dementia initiatives and spoke to hospice nurses and MPs about the need for greater research into the illness. Through the Alzheimer’s Society she befriended other people with the diagnosis. “There is nothing more comforting than confiding in other people like you,” she said. “And no one batting an eyelid if someone thinks Queen Elizabeth is pregnant. It is absolutely non-judgmental, and oh, there’s so much laughter — because so much is very funny, the ridiculous things we can do.”
As her memory unravelled she began to write about her experiences in a blog titled Which Me Am I Today? from her terraced cottage in a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where she lived alone. It served as her memory hard-drive but it also fed her mission to dispel the myth that dementia is a disease of memory loss alone. She recorded the “smell hallucinations” that sent her hunting around the house for a non-existent source of burning, her lack of taste or thirst (she mourned the loss of her beloved Yorkshire tea) and visual hallucinations of her late father.
In 2018 she turned such musings into a memoir, Somebody I Used to Know. Written with the help of the journalist Anna Wharton, it became a Sunday Times bestseller. “But it’s very weird,” Mitchell said later. “Because I don’t know what’s in the book. I can’t read my book, because as soon as I turn the page, I forget what I’ve just read.”
Wendy Mitchell was born in Wakefield, west Yorkshire, in 1956. Fractions of her childhood surfaced in her memoir later on: as a child she recalled six years spent sweeping the floorboards of her parents’ pub, the Railway Hotel, looking for pennies on the floor to spend on sweets. Her mother later became a secretary for Hay’s Lemonade and her father worked in a steel factory.
While working at St James’s Hospital in Leeds, where she was in charge of a team that prepared nursing rotas, she began to notice a fog in her brain and the occasional “black hole”. After tripping on a jog on York’s Millennium Bridge she booked an appointment to see her doctor, who suggested she had had a stroke. When she was diagnosed 18 months later with early-onset Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia she had little support, beyond her daughters, Gemma and Sarah, who survive her.
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“I thought — well, I thought: what now? I felt a total emptiness,” she recalled. “There was nothing I could do. The inevitability of what was going to happen was out of my hands.”
The reality was quite the opposite. By the time she retired from the NHS in 2015 she was busier than she had been before. In 2014 she advised Julianne Moore on her Oscar-winning performance of early-onset dementia in the film Still Alice, she attended conferences and made appearances on television. A second book, What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, was published in 2022. In One Last Thing, her final book, she wrote about her support for assisted dying. One of her greatest fears, she said, was being alive when she was no longer able to recognise her daughters.
The occasional melancholy would creep in when she descended into “a fog” and retired to her “memory room”, in which she hung photos of people and places she knew. She missed baking and calling friends on the phone, and in an interview for The Sunday Times in 2022 Audrey Ward noted that the fingers of her right hand often strummed the air, as though conjuring the words by typing them. “Mitchell is eloquent, her speech flows, but every now and again there is a stutter,” Ward wrote, “a glance into the distance while she plucks at the air as if reaching for an elusive word.”
Yet her final years were a far cry from the reticent nurse she had been ten years before. She dyed her hair purple and pink, went skydiving, walked the 1,000ft highwire Infinity Bridge in Cumbria and abseiled down London’s “Cheesegrater”, the Leadenhall Building. And she continued to take delight in the small things. “If you can still enjoy gazing at the moon,” she wrote, “does it matter if you can’t remember what it’s called?”
Wendy Mitchell, author and dementia campaigner, was born in 1956. She died peacefully on February 22, 2024, aged 68
