When Eric Reeves’s wife died from early-onset dementia at just 54, it marked the end of a tortuous six years.
Having watched Gaye, his partner of 30 years, gradually slip away – ‘In the end, it was like she was there but she wasn’t,’ he says – Eric was a broken man.
At the wake, held at the couple’s home, he was barely able to speak. But there was someone on hand to support him: his girlfriend, Tami.
‘I organised