Daniel O’Leary’s sensitive and insightful treatment of an immensely difficult subject must have struck a chord with many people (“Silent grace of forgetting”, 12 October). For me it evoked memories of a much-loved grandmother, who ended her days in the nether world of dementia 50 years ago, incarcerated in a grim nineteenth-century institution.  The slide of a loved one into dementia at any age is a kind of slow bereavement. It brings with it all the emotional pain of a real bereavement, including anger, which all too often can be turned on the innocent victim perceived as the source of the “problem”. Or, equally damaging, it can turn inward, ­manifesting as depression in the person experiencing the loss. And for carers who are not emotionally