Sundowning: a calm label for fear and chaos

As night falls, dementia can wreak more havoc on patients and carers, says Melanie Reid

- Melanie Reid

My earliest exposure to dementia, as a six-year-old, seemed like a crime scene: poo smeared on the white walls of the downstairs loo.

My mother wasn't in the house - she was out chasing my grandmother, by then far down the road knocking on neighbours' doors demanding to know where Margaret was.

Poor granny. Shipped hundreds of miles to our house because Aunty Margaret couldn’t cope, she had reached the stage of dementia when only a residential home could.

The matter was hushed up; in the 1960s “senility” was private distress. My father lived the next 40-odd years in grim fear he'd inherited it.

He hadn't, though. It was my poor mother, her blood pressure cooked by a lifetime of serving him, who had a stroke, got vascular dementia, and drifted away from his demands. Towards the end they lived next door to us, and I was their emergency service.