Everyone has their own special way of grieving. Mine turned my life upside down.

On 26 November 2014, two days after the funeral of my father, I sent a slightly unhinged email to the Observer saying there was a piece “I want (need) to write… My very lovely and beloved father died two weeks ago, after a long and distressing time suffering from dementia. He had been in gradual decline for more than a decade but went into hospital in February, and while there seemed to go off a cliff: his deterioration was catastrophic and when he came out a few weeks later he was emaciated to the point of starvation, immobile, bed bound, incapable of stringing words together, hardly able to recognise anyone.”

For the five weeks my father was in hospital we had barely been allowed to see him because of an outbreak of norovirus on his ward. No one to tend to him, feed him, hold his hand, stroke his silver hair, say his name, smile, tell him they loved him, keep him tethered to the world that he had lived in so long and so well. He must have felt bewildered, distressed, abandoned. He came home like a ghost, and his last nine months was a period of slow-motion dying.

All these years on, it still wrenches my heart to think of it. I was, I wrote in the email, intending to start a campaign that would insist, very simply, that the carers of those with dementia have the same rights as parents of sick children to accompany them when in hospital. Of course, I see now that I wanted to rescue my father, who was beyond rescue; I wanted him to forgive me (because I couldn’t find the way to forgive myself).

The Observer has a long and honourable tradition of campaigning, including the abolition of capital punishment and – after research by psychologist John Bowlby into “separation anxiety” – the campaign for unrestricted........

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