On behalf of the trustees of Remembering Not to Forget, I hope that all of our supporters and their families and friends are keeping well in these surreal times. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much harder this situation would have been if Mum had still been alive, how confusing it would have been for her, how frustrating to not be able to leave the house, how difficult to balance the need for the carers coming in to help with the everyday tasks against limiting contact with people outside the immediate household. The current circumstances are challenging for everyone, I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people living with dementia and their families right now with those extra concerns. Our thoughts are with everyone facing that reality.
Because of the current limits on socialising and movement we will not be planning any events or activities for the foreseeable future. You might have noticed that we have been quite quiet of late anyway. Many of our supporters will be aware that my grumpy, infuriating, wonderful dad, Simon Turnbull, died in October 2019. We discovered after Mum’s death in 2017 that he was in late stage kidney disease, a shock to both me and my sister; although we knew he wasn’t in the best of health there just hadn’t been enough space for him to be ill whilst we all grappled with the all-consumingness of looking after Mum. His decline was sudden and especially hard coming so soon after losing Mum. We miss him very much. So – to those of you caring for someone living with dementia – please make sure you are open about your own health and well-being with your family and friends, and that you look after yourselves, now especially.
Sadly we lost another member of our family in February of this year when my aunt Sara Turnbull suffered a heart attack. Sara was a staunch supporter of Remembering Not to Forget, and we were very touched that the family chose Remembering Not to Forget as the charity to receive donations at her funeral. We will be using the funds so generously donated to fund a music related project, as she was a passionate supporter of various music projects and an avid opera goer. We obviously have no idea when we will be able to get this project off the ground, but we look forward to being able to honour her memory in this way.
The projects that we have already funded are run by individual organisations. Although the activities funded by previous donations will now be on hold, we know that activities will resume when it is safe to do so both for the client groups, and for the wider population.
We’ll be in touch again when the world has gone back to some kind of normality. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, and each other.
