Hawke - Gen Y - and dementia
July 3rd 2010 23:22
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From: The Australian
SOPHIE Pieters-Hawke does not, as a rule, flaunt her famous surname to win favours.
But the 25-year-old granddaughter of Bob and Hazel Hawke admits she has been dropping the "H-bomb" all over Sydney lately.
She and three friends, all in their 20s, have launched an initiative called the Forget-Me-Not project, which aims to raise money and awareness of the impact of dementia on young people. It is a battle Sophie knows her grandmother would approve of. "I'm doing it on behalf of Nana because she no longer can," she said.
Hazel Hawke, who was married to former prime minister Bob Hawke for nearly 40 years until they divorced in 1995, was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 2001.
When she went public with her diagnosis two years later, it was a breakthrough moment for the dementia movement. Nearly a decade on, there is still no effective treatment for the disease Hazel always referred to as the "Big A".
Like a growing number of Generation Ys, Sophie has experienced the impact of dementia first hand since she was a teenager. It has, she says, profoundly shaped her life. The pain of watching her once playful, forthright and loving grandmother slowly disappear has fast-tracked her into adulthood.
Her mother, Sue Pieters-Hawke, was until last year Hazel's primary carer and Sophie shared some of that responsibility. They moved in next door to her grandmother in 2003 and the two homes became one household.
Sophie learned the stigma and silence that accompany a dementia diagnosis in any family is even more pervasive among young people. "The stigma remains strong within our generation," she said. "We are young, and our love of our youth frames ageing and changing as foreign and anti to our own identity."
The impetus for the Forget-Me-Not initiative began over dinner with a friend. "My friend was constantly devastated by her own grandmother's diagnosis and was really struggling to come to terms with it. So we recruited two other girls and we got serious."
They now have a website and a fundraising cocktail party is organised at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in September, which explains the name dropping.
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