Max Lugavere’s charismatic mother, Kathy, was in her late fifties when she began to show strange signs of cognitive decline, first complaining of brain fog, then being unable to grasp words, and struggling to walk – it was “as though she was wearing a space suit underwater”. In the summer of 2011 he remembers her mentioning that she had been to see a neurologist about her memory. His father jokingly asked her what year it was. She couldn’t recall and began to cry. “It was heartbreaking,” he says today.
Lugavere, now 41, moved back home to New York to help care for her after she was eventually diagnosed with rare Lewy body dementia. She died six years later, aged 66.
As a science journalist, Lugavere
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