Vicky McClure learned while she was on holiday with Jonny Owen that another member of Our Dementia Choir had died. She said the loss was heartbreaking, and it landed inside a project she built around people living with dementia in Nottingham in 2018.
Our Dementia Choir in 2018
McClure formed Our Dementia Choir in 2018, and the latest death puts a hard edge on why the project keeps cutting through. Her own words are blunt: “That is a regular occurrence because that is the nature of dementia.”
The same reality runs through the quote she gave about the loss: “It’s the UK's biggest killer. Worldwide everybody's facing it and it's it's heartbreaking, but it does make me feel like I should grab life.” That is not a public-relations line. It is the practical consequence of building a choir around people whose lives are being shortened by the condition.
Jonny Owen in Norway
McClure and Owen spent part of this summer in Norway, and she used that time to talk about how fragile routine can look when grief cuts across it. “I think we all have that sense – whenever somebody around you becomes ill or you know, you become ill yourself or you just realise just how fragile life is and just how grateful we should always try to be,” she said.
She went further on the point of living in the moment: “You don't need to be a guru. You don't need to sit and bathe in a forest or do all these things to feel that you can do that wherever you are right now, wherever you live in the world. We can all just try and remind ourselves, I suppose, when you come somewhere like this it's like the the humongous sense of gratitude.” The message lands because it comes from the same person who has watched the choir lose members as dementia works its way through the group.
September 26 on Saturday Kitchen
McClure is also in the middle of a busy TV run, with Trigger Point still on her slate and a guest appearance set for Saturday Kitchen on September 26. That keeps the story in the present tense: public grief, ongoing work, and a charity-style project that keeps being reshaped by the illness it was built to confront.
The unresolved point is the member’s identity. McClure has said what happened and why it hit her so hard; the next thing readers need is the name of the person she lost, because that is the real measure of how a private death has entered a public story.
