Lady Thatcher and Alzheimer’s

Opinion is divided as to whether Carol Thatcher, daughter of Margaret and the late Denis, should have revealed, in her autobiography, that her  mother now has dementia.

Yes, the once-indestructible Iron Lady, aged 82, has a form of Alzheimer’s Disease and hardly knows whether it is today or yesterday. She believes that her late husband, Denis, is still alive, and has to be told, over and over again, of his demise. Though why she has to be told this, I cannot fathom. If she imagines Denis is alive, why not let her?  Why cause a fragile old lady repeated grief by repeating the news of her widowhood?

Most of us have known relations or friends who have succumbed to dementia of one form or another – there are many ways of suffering from senility. When very old, my own mother thought my late brother was still alive, and I didn’t see the point of inflicting the memory of loss over and over again. She began to live in a world of her own – a most vivid world of the earlier years of the 20th century, which for her had a golden glow.

A wiser friend said: “Isn’t it wonderful that she can feel surrounded by those she has known when young?” Shakespeare coined the term “a fool’s paradise” when people imagine what is not so; but Dickens described the special cruelty of those who so brutally concentrated on “facts, facts, facts”. There is a time when fancy takes precedence.

Some feel that Carol is being unkind and opportunistic – she does have a book to publicise - in revealing this particular fact about her mother, and describing exactly how it happened. Lady Thatcher, at 75, suddenly became confused in a discussion about foreign relations, mixing up the Balkans with the Falklands – something she would never have done in her steel-sharp prime. Subsequently, a series of mini-strokes disabled her once formidable brain.

The brain is a fascinating organ, though: Maggie can still remember the minutest detail about working in her father’s grocery shop in Grantham, Lincolnshire as a girl. She could still tell you the price of sugar and butter in 1938. My own mother was just the same. Her memories of Co Galway in her girlhood were crystal. But yesterday was a blur.

Yet some people are grateful to Carol, and assert she has done exactly the right thing in bringing the subject of dementia and Alzheimer’s out into the open. It can be a terrible thing to watch a beloved family member – especially a person remembered as a wonderful conversationalist, bright as a button, clever, and, like Maggie, with a once-prodigeous memory – decline into dementia. Eventually, it can be that all personality is lost, and all recognition dimmed. I have seen that too and it is pitiful.

Pitiful – but not shameful. There is no reason to conceal it as a family secret. The decline of the brain is a purely physiological phenomenon. It is not a form of mental laziness. Those who hope to stave it off by “taking their mind to the gym” – doing crosswords and Sudoku – are kidding themselves. It can happen to those with the most mentally agile mind, while couch potatoes who have never expended the least mental effort retain the full complement of marbles to the end.

On balance, I think Carol is right. She has done mental health a favour by speaking openly about her mother’s decline. Actually, everyone in political circles knew that Baroness Thatcher was suffering from a noticeable mental decline: there were open allusions to the lady being “away with the fairies”, in the not unaffectionate phrase. Recent photographs, anyway, quite clearly demonstrate an expression of bewilderment and confusion on Maggie’s face.

Other reactions are expressed in the wake of Carol Thatcher’s revelation: the schadenfreude  of those who always loathed Mrs Thatcher, as she was, or the wistful contemplation of how the mighty are fallen, as in -  Sic transit gloria mundi.