The Sex Pistols star Johnny Rotten knew instantly how to react when his Nora, his beloved wife of 44 years, who was a publishing heiress from Germany, received the bombshell news that she had Alzheimer’s. The neurogenerative condition, which damages brain cells and causes memory loss, confusion and cognitive difficulties, is linked to a deeply personal experience of his own.
Johnny fell into a coma at the tender age of seven after contracting meningitis, and when he awoke, he didn’t recognise his own parents. The condition causes inflammation of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord, and in severe cases, can cause symptoms which overlap with Alzheimer’s, such as confusion. That meant he knew exactly how to react when the heartbreaking news about Nora first emerged.
The 69-year-old Never Mind The B******s star, whose real name is John Lydon, confided: “My memory loss with meningitis all came into play when she got Alzheimer’s – like forgetting who you are, but knowing you were someone. You could not quite put it all together.
“At the time, the hospital told my mum and dad not to mollycoddle me, and things would come back. Even though it seemed cruel at the time, I found myself, my way. It was the greatest gift they could have given me.”
He continued to The Mirror: “That memory loss, when Nora was going through that with Alzheimer’s, I could look back on that and think ‘Wow, that served a purpose.’ Don’t throw away experiences in life, as they may come back in life and be useful.
“That helped no end in dealing with Nora, like not to force questions on her, and she got it. It would snap in her head and the memory would come back in her head on its own.”
However, there was one crucial and brutal difference between his condition and hers: while his brain hadn’t been permanently damaged by meningitis and his memory would come back, Nora’s would eventually “get worse and worse and worse”.
The pair’s bond went back a long way, ever since their first meeting at Vivienne Westwood’s punk boutique Sex in London in 1975 – and when he finally lost her in 2023, it was heart-breaking.
Johnny wrote a song in his wife’s honour after her 2023 death, called Hawaii, and travelled all the way to Dublin to perform it on The Late Late Show – but that evening he was in floods of tears.
“I just cried my way through it as I am human. I don’t know if I will ever perform that live again, you know,” he confessed, adding: “It is too painful.”