This below article made me a little sad. Age and dementia spares no one, not even the brightest of mind, not even the Iron lady, Margaret Thatcher.
Well, I can understand and empathise with her daughter, Carol Thatcher.
My grandma had dementia in her later years. Most of the times, she could not recognise people, even her closest immediate family.
My aunt who visited grandma during one festive holiday told my mother that grandma was delirious. And that she was vulgar! Yes, grandma whom I never saw speaking any vulgarities or an unkind word to anyone was spouting vulgarities like Linda Blair on the Exorcist. It was that terrifying.
She was wheel chair bound by then and couldn't walk about. And she was just sitting there swearing and cursing like no body business.
She was living with my dad then. He had divorced my mother and moved back to his mom's place. He employed a maid to help take care of grandma.
I did not see her during the time she got demented till the day she died. I was undergoing some personal crisis that time and was in no stage to see anyone. I couldn't take that responsibility with her when my whole life was in a mess then.
Sometimes, I wondered how my dad did it. I suppose he was the not the most meticulous of all people. So I suppose that there were some negligence involved. He had to work everyday and I dun think he and the maid provided the quality of care that she really required.
During her last week of her life, she was warded to the hospital cos she had a bleeding to her leg which just couldn't stop. And she was covered with bed sores. She wasn't lucid by then. Not for some time by then.
My mother and I saw her on the last few days of her life. She was lying in hospital, shrivelled and shrunken. She was really only half the woman that she was. She was this robust, tall, stocky woman and the patient lying on the bed was almost unrecognisable. She just looked like this very skinny old man, with bones sticking out of her body. Not the tall, proud lady she was once.
It did break my heart then to see her like that. And I could see my father like that, not too long in the future. And I also could see my self, in that condition, many years later, when I was old.
I did not know if she could recognise me or my mother when we visited her in hospital. She was breathing heavily into a respirator, her eyes darting left and right.
She passed away a few days later.
At the funeral, I asked myself, if I would end up like that? With 4 children and a number of grand children, and yet in her senior years, her life was not exactly in the best of condition.
And me with no children, no close immediate family, would my condition be worse off in my latter years?
Frankly, I do not think I want to grow that old with dementia, with no one to take care of me. Life by then would be a living hell.
I shuddered when I thought of that.
------------------------
The Straits Times
25 Aug 2008
Iron Lady struggles to remember
Ex-British PM even forgets husband has died, says daughter in new book
LONDON: The daughter of British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher tells how her mother's dementia has left her struggling to remember the simplest facts in book extracts published yesterday.
Ms Carol Thatcher wrote that, on her worst days, her mother struggles to finish sentences but shows occasional glimpses of her old self, particularly when talking about her time in Downing Street. 'I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 per cent cast-iron damage-proof,' Ms Thatcher wrote in her memoir, A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl, which was serialised in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Mrs Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, was Britain's first and so far only female premier and was in office as head of a Conservative government between 1979 and 1990.
The book is believed to be the first time a family member has spoken publicly of her condition.
Ms Thatcher says she first noticed her mother's memory was failing over lunch in 2000 - a decade after she had left power. Mrs Thatcher, then 75, got confused between Bosnia and the Falklands during a conversation about the war in the former Yugoslavia, she wrote.
She wrote she 'almost fell off her chair' seeing her mother struggle with her words and her memory. 'I couldn't believe it,' she wrote. Ms Thatcher goes on to describe how tell-tale signs of dementia then began to emerge.
'Whereas previously you would never have had to say anything to her twice, because she'd already filed it away in her formidable memory bank, Mum started asking the same questions over and over again, unaware she was doing so.
'It might be something innocuous - such as 'What time is my car coming?' or 'When am I going to the hairdresser?' - but the fact she needed to repeat them opened a new and frightening chapter in our lives.'
Now aged 83, Mrs Thatcher gave up speaking in public in 2002 on the advice of her doctors after a series of small strokes.
Ms Thatcher described how she had to learn to be patient and that her mother 'had an illness and that it wasn't personal'. 'That's the worst thing about dementia: It gets you every time,' she wrote.
'Sufferers look and act the same but beneath the familiar exterior, something quite different is going on. They're in another world and you cannot enter.
'Much of my mother's daily life was affected. Timing became a particular concern. If I said, 'Oh, do relax, Mum. The car won't be here for 10 minutes,' she'd jump up, hook her handbag over her arm and say, 'Ten minutes? I'll go down now' as if I'd said 30 seconds.'
Ms Thatcher also wrote of how her mother keeps forgetting that she lost her husband Denis to pancreatic cancer in 2003. 'I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,' she wrote.
'Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she'd look at me sadly and say 'Oh' as I struggled to compose myself.
' 'Were we all there?' she'd ask softly.'
Ms Thatcher also recalled how when a friend asked her mother about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, 'she snapped back into Iron Lady mode and was utterly engaging'.
Mrs Thatcher briefly returned to the limelight in September last year when she visited Downing Street as a guest of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He praised her as a 'conviction politician'.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Well, I can understand and empathise with her daughter, Carol Thatcher.
My grandma had dementia in her later years. Most of the times, she could not recognise people, even her closest immediate family.
My aunt who visited grandma during one festive holiday told my mother that grandma was delirious. And that she was vulgar! Yes, grandma whom I never saw speaking any vulgarities or an unkind word to anyone was spouting vulgarities like Linda Blair on the Exorcist. It was that terrifying.
She was wheel chair bound by then and couldn't walk about. And she was just sitting there swearing and cursing like no body business.
She was living with my dad then. He had divorced my mother and moved back to his mom's place. He employed a maid to help take care of grandma.
I did not see her during the time she got demented till the day she died. I was undergoing some personal crisis that time and was in no stage to see anyone. I couldn't take that responsibility with her when my whole life was in a mess then.
Sometimes, I wondered how my dad did it. I suppose he was the not the most meticulous of all people. So I suppose that there were some negligence involved. He had to work everyday and I dun think he and the maid provided the quality of care that she really required.
During her last week of her life, she was warded to the hospital cos she had a bleeding to her leg which just couldn't stop. And she was covered with bed sores. She wasn't lucid by then. Not for some time by then.
My mother and I saw her on the last few days of her life. She was lying in hospital, shrivelled and shrunken. She was really only half the woman that she was. She was this robust, tall, stocky woman and the patient lying on the bed was almost unrecognisable. She just looked like this very skinny old man, with bones sticking out of her body. Not the tall, proud lady she was once.
It did break my heart then to see her like that. And I could see my father like that, not too long in the future. And I also could see my self, in that condition, many years later, when I was old.
I did not know if she could recognise me or my mother when we visited her in hospital. She was breathing heavily into a respirator, her eyes darting left and right.
She passed away a few days later.
At the funeral, I asked myself, if I would end up like that? With 4 children and a number of grand children, and yet in her senior years, her life was not exactly in the best of condition.
And me with no children, no close immediate family, would my condition be worse off in my latter years?
Frankly, I do not think I want to grow that old with dementia, with no one to take care of me. Life by then would be a living hell.
I shuddered when I thought of that.
------------------------
The Straits Times
25 Aug 2008
Iron Lady struggles to remember
Ex-British PM even forgets husband has died, says daughter in new book
LONDON: The daughter of British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher tells how her mother's dementia has left her struggling to remember the simplest facts in book extracts published yesterday.
Ms Carol Thatcher wrote that, on her worst days, her mother struggles to finish sentences but shows occasional glimpses of her old self, particularly when talking about her time in Downing Street. 'I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 per cent cast-iron damage-proof,' Ms Thatcher wrote in her memoir, A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl, which was serialised in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Mrs Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, was Britain's first and so far only female premier and was in office as head of a Conservative government between 1979 and 1990.
The book is believed to be the first time a family member has spoken publicly of her condition.
Ms Thatcher says she first noticed her mother's memory was failing over lunch in 2000 - a decade after she had left power. Mrs Thatcher, then 75, got confused between Bosnia and the Falklands during a conversation about the war in the former Yugoslavia, she wrote.
She wrote she 'almost fell off her chair' seeing her mother struggle with her words and her memory. 'I couldn't believe it,' she wrote. Ms Thatcher goes on to describe how tell-tale signs of dementia then began to emerge.
'Whereas previously you would never have had to say anything to her twice, because she'd already filed it away in her formidable memory bank, Mum started asking the same questions over and over again, unaware she was doing so.
'It might be something innocuous - such as 'What time is my car coming?' or 'When am I going to the hairdresser?' - but the fact she needed to repeat them opened a new and frightening chapter in our lives.'
Now aged 83, Mrs Thatcher gave up speaking in public in 2002 on the advice of her doctors after a series of small strokes.
Ms Thatcher described how she had to learn to be patient and that her mother 'had an illness and that it wasn't personal'. 'That's the worst thing about dementia: It gets you every time,' she wrote.
'Sufferers look and act the same but beneath the familiar exterior, something quite different is going on. They're in another world and you cannot enter.
'Much of my mother's daily life was affected. Timing became a particular concern. If I said, 'Oh, do relax, Mum. The car won't be here for 10 minutes,' she'd jump up, hook her handbag over her arm and say, 'Ten minutes? I'll go down now' as if I'd said 30 seconds.'
Ms Thatcher also wrote of how her mother keeps forgetting that she lost her husband Denis to pancreatic cancer in 2003. 'I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,' she wrote.
'Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she'd look at me sadly and say 'Oh' as I struggled to compose myself.
' 'Were we all there?' she'd ask softly.'
Ms Thatcher also recalled how when a friend asked her mother about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, 'she snapped back into Iron Lady mode and was utterly engaging'.
Mrs Thatcher briefly returned to the limelight in September last year when she visited Downing Street as a guest of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He praised her as a 'conviction politician'.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
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