Article by Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones
On Christmas Day 2017, on my husband’s suggestion, we bought my mother a Dictaphone to record her memories and her life. Having taught English for many years, and being a relentless storyteller and chatterbox, Mum always had a lot to say. The following year, on Boxing Day 2018, she was rushed into hospital, having lost her speech, mumbling semblances of words that had once so easily flowed from her.
‘During that dislocating, jumbled time where words combined with other words to form sounds that no one around her could comprehend, one thing was clear and she repeated it with whatever half-words she could: this woman, with her determined, forceful spirit, did not want to survive without language. Though noises came, she had been rendered...