The recently deceased Clairy Polak was not only one of the best journalists in Dutch broadcasting history, she also wrote an important book about dementia: Gone, gone.
It appeared in 2019, just under ten years after NOS introduced her as a presenter during the transition from Nova Unpleasant News hour cowardly sidelined for fear of the populist right. “It was a danger to be interviewed by her,” Prime Minister Rutte responded to her death. He meant it as a compliment, but it also expressed genuine apprehension.
Of Gone, gone Polak debuted as a novelist. This brings me straight to my only objection to the book. I would have preferred Polak not to have a novel on this subject, but one memoir had written, a purely autobiographical account of her dealings with her demented husband. As a novel, the book is just a little too thin, if memoir had it been even more convincing – it would have reached the level of Before is deadthe wonderful book by Inez van Dullemen about her declining parents.
Yet it is Gone, gone very worthwhile, because Polak is an experiential expert par excellence: with great powers of observation and journalistic pen she describes the demise of her husband. Polak has made no secret of the publicity that she described her own experiences. She didn’t want to pour a collection of endearing or moving anecdotes on the reader, she wanted to show how the days and the phases unfold in such a marriage.
She calls dementia “an incomprehensible disease” because the patient’s reactions are so unpredictable. Sometimes she says “Leo” and he replies “yes dear”, like in the old days. But it may also happen that he does not recognize her and says that his wife is dead. Then when she contradicts him, he remains silent.
She admits that she sometimes yelled angrily at him “when he wanted to walk into the street in the middle of the night naked or only in a T-shirt for the umpteenth time.”
“She could no longer stand her own powerlessness,” she writes, “it made her desperate, brought her to the brink of panic. Leo had been extremely sensitive to her moods. When she was petulant Leo became unruly, when she was sad he became sad, when she tried to ignore him he became aggressive.”
When she has transferred her husband to the nursing home against his will, she is overflowing with guilt. She flees to her beloved Switzerland for a week’s vacation, but there she is confronted with the most difficult of all questions: “Who do I still have meaning for?”
She comes to the painful conclusion that Leo’s life in the nursing home no longer makes sense. “And that she derives the meaning of her life exclusively from the maintenance of that meaninglessness.”
Polak told me two years ago de Volkskrant what she herself would do if she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “I decided to end my life immediately. With Alzheimer’s you should not delay for too long, because otherwise you will be sure that you are no longer in control. And my experience with that disease is such that I would like to spare myself.”
A version of this article also appeared in the September 6, 2023 issue.