At a glance…
- Jim Rogers is a former property developer, husband, father and grandfather who was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s at 55 in 2021.
- Millie Robinson is Jim’s eldest daughter and ghostwriter. Together they have co-written the memoir Holding on to Happiness, published in September 2026. It explores grief, family, love, identity and Jim’s experience of living with Alzheimer’s.
- They join Tiffany Dunk on The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast to talk about their story and how love shaped their lives.
When Jim Rogers was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s at 55, it was far from the first time his family had been forced to face the unimaginable.
Years earlier, Jim had been left to raise his three young children alone following the death of his wife, Lorna. In the years that followed, life took another unexpected turn when Jim found love again, eventually building a new life with his husband, Ty.
Now, Jim and his eldest daughter, Millie Robinson, are sharing their family’s remarkable story and their upcoming memoir on The Australian Women’s Weekly’s Love Stories podcast.
Listen to the episode:
Love never followed a straightforward path for Jim. He met his wife Lorna in a small English town, where the pair bonded over a shared obsession with VW Beetles. They married, had three children and moved to Perth, building a family and a life together in the sunshine. Then, everything changed.
Lorna was diagnosed with melanoma and, after a devastating battle with the disease, died, leaving Jim to raise their three children, all under nine, on his own.
“It was just an awful time, really,” Jim tells Love Stories host Tiffany Dunk.
“They thought they’d got it quite cleanly, and they said to her, literally, ‘Go away, be positive, and enjoy your life,’ which is exactly what we did…But it returned, and things went downhill quite quickly from there.”
Eighteen months after her death, Jim’s parents sent him on a holiday he didn’t particularly want to take.
“I wasn’t very well, and I was losing weight, and I’d been through the mill. I was trying to be this perfect dad and was obsessed with making sure everything was perfect for [my children],” he shares. “My whole family had talked, and they had decided that I was going to have a break from the kids.”
He could never have known then that the trip would change the course of his life again. There, he met Tyler. With Tyler and friendly guests on the holiday, Jim started coming out of his shell.
“Eventually, towards the end of the holiday, we were walking back from there, and literally one by one everybody had dropped off, but I was still with Ty,” he recalls. “I was thinking, ‘he is so funny’; even today, the man just makes me laugh so much.”
What began unexpectedly became a relationship that Jim initially kept quietly in the background of family life. Twenty-six years later, they are still together.
And while falling in love again brought happiness, it also forced Jim to confront complicated feelings about the love he had lost.
As he and his eldest daughter, Millie, explain on Love Stories, Lorna remained an important part of their family story. Writing about that period for Jim’s new memoir, Holding On to Happiness, meant revisiting some of the most painful moments of their lives. For Millie, who became her father’s ghostwriter, the process was an intensely personal one.
“I found it excruciating,” Jim says of answering his daughter’s questions about how he and Tyler first met, while also describing how difficult it was to go back through the final hours of Lorna’s life. Yet somehow, father and daughter managed to find humour among the heartbreak.
“I think our love language probably is humour,” Jim says.
“Even throughout the whole book process, we go into some deep and dark places, but we kept the thread of humour throughout the whole project,” Millie adds.
Their memoir, Holding On to Happiness, is ultimately a record of a life that has taken some extraordinary turns. But it is also a story about what remains when circumstances change: family, connection and the people who continue to show up.
And then came another life-changing chapter. At 55, Jim was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s.
The diagnosis has changed the way Jim and his family think about the future, but it has not diminished his determination to live fully in the present. In the Love Stories conversation, Jim and Millie speak candidly about the realities of dementia, the fear of an uncertain future and the ways their family is learning to navigate it together.
For Millie, watching her father live with dementia has been heartbreaking. But she also sees the qualities that have carried him through the hardest moments of his life.
“He’s just so inspiring,” she tells Tiffany. “He has gone through so many trials and tribulations, and he is so positive.”
Their story is one of love and loss, but it is also about finding love again, building a family and holding on to happiness when life looks nothing like you expected.
Listen to Jim and Millie Rogers’ full conversation on The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast.
Watch the episode:
The Australian Women’s Weekly Love Stories podcast is brought to you by Wounded Heroes.
Listen to the Love Stories podcast wherever you get your podcasts. More information here.
You can listen to Jim’s podcast, Hold The Moment, here. Find Jim & Millie’s book, Holding on to Happiness, here.
