I would never describe myself as a romantic hero. So I am always surprised how much it amazes people that at the age of 63, I moved into a Hertfordshire care home to be with my wife, then 64, who had advanced dementia.

For four nights a week, for more than nine years, I lived with her inside the care system, while continuing to work part-time in London.

The why was easy: why ever would I not? My love for her was unchanged by her diagnosis. We were soulmates; no-one understood each other as well as we did. If Maggie was no longer going to be able to communicate her needs with her previous clarity and self-confidence, then I was clearly the next best person to be her voice and advocate. And her needs were 24 hours a day, so I obviously had to be by her side as much as I could.

It never occurred to me that there was another way of doing it. Maggie had given me so much in our years together – this wasn’t just my chance to give something back, this was where the ‘in sickness and in health’ of our marriage vows suddenly meant something real and valuable. Why wouldn’t I live with her, even if it meant radically changing my life.

The how was more about luck. We were not rich but Maggie had been a global leader in her field as a business valuations expert and I had a successful strategic consultancy business, advising banks and wealth managers. This, and the annuity I took out to defray half the costs, meant we could afford to live in a comfortable set-up at the care home, paying for the top level of care.

We had no children to whom we would leave our savings; what we did have was a vast diaspora of friends across the globe and, more importantly, real roots locally. Outside friends visited throughout.

Maggie and I got together relatively late in life, in our mid-40s, neither having been married before. As she would laugh, ‘we met on the shelf’. You couldn’t not be struck by her – she was extraordinary: a force of nature at six foot, sparklingly intelligent, fearless, spirited – and just enormous fun.

I was dazzled and devoted and within months, our worlds were meshed. I loved the entree into her world of culture and arts and she took on my life of sport – rugby, polo, skiing, swimming and sailing – with gusto. Soon we were talking about marriage.

‘1996 is a leap year,’ she teased me. ‘So perhaps it’s up to me to do the proper proposal!’ Being Maggie, unbeknown to me, she booked a table in the River Room at The Savoy on February 29 to do just that, but I beat her to it, proposing to her two weeks before – on Valentine’s Day, naturally – at Boisdale, one of our favourite restaurants in London.

In November 1996, we had a big wedding at Farm Street Church in Mayfair and spent our first married weekend at the Ritz, because Maggie knew the owners. I never stopped thinking that I was lucky to have found her and, as Maggie herself said, with heartbreaking unconscious irony, I was someone she ‘would like to grow old with’. For 15 years we laughed together, travelled together, threw parties both large and small, embraced each other’s worlds and professional successes. Overall, married life couldn’t have been better.

Then, in 2009, the year before she turned 60, there were small signs that all was not well. We had a conversation about finding house keys, during which she took extraordinary lengths to avoid using the actual word ‘key’ – because she couldn’t remember the word.

With hindsight, as a psychiatrist later mused, Maggie’s cleverness meant she had probably been masking her dementia symptoms for years.

She may even, on one level, have been aware that her cognitive abilities were struggling: I had been a little mystified when she chose to retire early from her firm a few years before.

At her 60th birthday party, held for 100 at private club Home House in London, guests wondered why she didn’t give her own speech (she was a natural orator, witty and hilarious) and three of her friends sat me down and asked when I was going to find out what was wrong with her.

A battery of tests followed and, towards the end of 2010, we were given the diagnosis: semantic dementia (a frontotemporal decline, involving loss of vocabulary and use of words), as well as Alzheimer’s: a combination characterised by a rapid decline in the ability to communicate, remember routines and directions, accompanied by a physical decline.

We went to Maggie’s beloved holiday home in northern France, at Le Touquet, to process it all. ‘I’ve had such a wonderful life, I can’t complain,’ Maggie said to me after a lot of discussion. ‘But I want a few more years.’

In the face of such bravery, who was I to falter? I now owed it to Maggie to be as strong for her as she had always been for me.

To be honest, the road from here to moving into the care home was the hardest part. It wasn’t just that I had to watch helplessly as she declined and lost her ability to make decisions. I also had to gradually take over the responsibility for all her affairs, navigating the bureaucracy of health and juggling the jigsaw of putting care into place.

We set up power of attorney for her, which I shared with two of our closest friends. For all three of us, the question, ‘What would Maggie do?’ would be our default point of reference. It became so important a tenet that I used the phrase as the title of the book I later wrote about her final decade of life.

By the time Maggie was 63, we knew a care home was the next step. One summer’s evening in 2014, we were driving back from London to our home in Hertfordshire and, on the outskirts of town, I saw a huge banner on a large office block, announcing its conversion into a luxury care home: ‘Specialist in Dementia Care.’ Serendipitously, the building was in what had been my great- great-grandparents’ orchard back in the 1850s.

‘That sign was meant for us,’ I said to Maggie. We moved in on January 26, 2015, on its first day of business: we were the care home’s first – and most unusual – residents.

We occupied one of the best suites: a huge sitting room, a decent double bedroom and en suite bathroom, with views over the garden. I did my best to make it look and feel not like a room in a care institution, furnishing it with pieces from home and hanging familiar pictures on the wall.

During that first year, the home filled with 85 residents and a staff of 80. There was a raft of clubs and activities, inside and outside, lots of communal rooms (not just one TV lounge) and a sense of bustle up the central ‘street’ of the ground floor, with its little shop at the end of it.

Yes, there were hand rails, hearing aid speakers and high stuffed chairs that are the tell-tale signs of an old-age medicalised environment, but it’s striking how soon I stopped noticing them.

Similarly, the supposed loss of dignity, which all our friends seemed to dread as an inevitability of geriatric care, meant nothing after a while. If Maggie didn’t mind me taking care of her personal needs on the few occasions that the carers weren’t there, then why on earth would I mind? We could order food, which was generally good and varied, in our apartment or in one of the two communal dining rooms. We always enjoyed the company of our fellow residents and I made – and still have – life-long friends there.

Although some had dementia, there were plenty of sharp-witted companions (many with fascinating life stories) for me – and in the early years for Maggie, too.

I can’t deny it was sad seeing some of those new friends fade over the years, but Maggie had shown me how easy it was to adapt: a simple walk in the sunshine with a friend could always be life-affirming, even if their grip on reality had slackened. I still have one friend there who keeps me on my toes to this day; I get into trouble if I don’t pop in every month or so to see her.

‘You’ll be bored rigid,’ the marketing manager had warned me before I moved in, but I never was. The pattern of our days was simple: two carers got Maggie up and we breakfasted, sociably, in the first-floor breakfast room before she relaxed in our room listening to her favourite opera.

I tried to keep a steady routine so that I could start work at a set time – two days a week from the home, three days in our Westminster flat in London. I always rushed back and looked forward to seeing Maggie on my return.

A long walk was the main focus of our day. Even if Maggie sometimes needed a nudge and a cajole, I was always the one who could persuade her. This alone, a doctor told me later, probably earned her at least five extra years. Without my loving prodding, who knows when Maggie would have been allowed to stop and then moulder into immobility?

In the early years, though she had stopped talking, Maggie would immerse herself in the cultural activities laid on by the home. And we still entertained.

Every one of Maggie’s birthdays saw me booking our favourite string quartet for a concert attended by friends from inside and outside – prosecco and canapés for all.

The carers joked that I had to be the only care home resident who still played polo and they loved it when my friends from the rugby club came to help with Maggie’s walking. As she gradually lost stability she needed support on each side to keep her from falling.

Meanwhile, our love for each other needed no help with stability: Maggie couldn’t speak but she could communicate with me perfectly well. With every smile and roll of her eyes, I usually knew exactly what she was thinking.

As the care home filled up, it was the level of staffing that led to my first real battle on Maggie’s behalf. Though carers were individually wonderful and professional, it became clear that there was a continuity issue and we were simply having too many different people involved in looking after her: 30 in one year at the worst point.

Familiarity is everything to someone with dementia and Maggie hated suddenly being confronted by two total strangers trying to undertake her personal care.

She occasionally became aggressive when this happened, which is usual for dementia sufferers, and the normal response was to prescribe sedation.

I was adamant they weren’t going to sedate her and instead drew up a list of ten carers (with four more in contingency) who were allowed to handle Maggie’s personal care. Eventually I got my way on it. Sedation would not be required.

Friends have often asked whether there was a moment I realised I was institutionalised. But I wasn’t institutionalised, the system was. All too often, the management structure of a care home and the surrounding bureaucracy is challenged by the notion that residents are high-paying clients, with reasonable expectations of bespoke service, not a standardised ‘one size fits all’ approach.

For those residents who are losing their decision-making abilities and critical faculties, their families are vital in advocating for them. Yet in many care homes, those families are all too often treated as visitors not as decision-makers with the legal power to speak for the resident.

This sharpened into focus when Maggie entered her final days.

There was a moment, two weeks before she died, when an ambulance was called and I felt under intense pressure to release her into hospital, which is a risky and distressing place for someone with dementia. I asked them to wait for five minutes and took myself off to think. What would Maggie do?

I realised I had to take responsibility for what might be a terminal decision – and I told them she was staying put. Later, all concerned agreed that this had been the right decision for Maggie.

As I used my increasing expertise and the privilege of being there to navigate the restrictions and occasional insanities of the care system, I did wonder how others less privileged and less experienced were supposed to manage.

I had moved into the care home out of love but out of love came purpose. That’s the only reason to tell our story and is why I wrote a book: to inspire others to fight on behalf of their loved ones and to use my hard-won insights in that fight.

Maggie died peacefully on April 3, 2024. She died in our bed in our room at the care home – our home. In the nine years we had lived there, her personality never changed, she made friends right up to her death and she treated me with love and affection to the end.

It would have been much harder if she had changed, but as I wheeled her out of the care home, three hours after she died, we were met by about 30 carers and other staff who had come in especially to line the corridors as we left.

There was not a dry eye in the house and I knew as strongly then as I knew at any other moment, that we had given each other the best last decade together that we possibly could have done.

The care home was no departure lounge but Maggie’s home and, if I had anything to do with it, our experience would be her legacy for others.

After 9 years personal experience of residential care, these are 10 ways Michael Maslinski believes looking after people with dementia needs to change.

1. Relationships between care homes, residents and their relatives need to improve. There should be regular reviews between residents, families and the senior managers in the home. This will reduce misunderstandings and disagreements later.
2. Residents’ needs should be put first. Nominated staff should be empowered and encouraged to use their judgement rather than being governed by play-it-safe processes and regulations. 
3. Attitude to risk needs to change completely, Care home providers’ fears of sanctions have become entangled in ever knottier regulations that ignore the holistic needs of the people who live in them. 
4. Legislation needs to be updated to ensure the people who work and run care homes are only liable in the event of clear negligence, not for misjudgements. 
5. Right from the start there should be complete transparency in the initial documentation and legal agreements between care homes and residents to reduce the risk of litigation later on. 
6. Care homes should acknowledge the agency of the family: encouraging - and enforcing - greater respect for power of attorney. 
7. Continuity of care should be encouraged. The familiarity of carers is a key element of care quality. This should be assessed regularly within each home. 
8. Exercise and keeping residents in a care home moving should be a priority. Mobility and exercise should be a key part of the care plan to improve quality of life. 
9. All health professionals should be trained in how to care for dementia sufferers. Doctors, hospital staff, therapists, paramedics all would benefit from reviewing their approach. 
10. Overall, we need to reduce bureaucracy and prioritise giving people with dementia a better quality of life. 

As told to Susannah Jowitt

What Would Maggie Do? by Michael Maslinski (£20, Unicorn) is out now