A Singular Life, an All Too Common End
By PAULA SPAN¶
The long list of roles Margaret Thatcher played during
her 87 years — potent politician, free-market evangelist, labor antagonist,
dominant global leader — includes the one she never publicly discussed: person
with dementia.
The stroke that killed her on Monday was not
her first. Mrs. Thatcher suffered several small strokes more than a decade
earlier, canceled all her speaking engagements in 2003 and largely withdrew
from public life. Even before the strokes, her daughter, Carol, wrote in a 2008 memoir,
she was losing cognitive ground, repeating questions and showing other signs of
confusion.
Heart-breakingly, she often forgot that her
beloved husband, Denis, had died of cancer in 2003. “I had to keep giving her
the bad news over and over again,” her daughter 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.”
At the time, members of her mother’s political
circle and other British commentators denounced Carol Thatcher for invading her
mother’s privacy and, supposedly, diminishing her dignity. The criticism arose
again in some quarters last year, when Meryl Streep won an Oscar for her
portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher’s dementia in “The Iron Lady.”
The contrast with her fellow conservative and
staunch supporter Ronald Reagan perhaps says something about American openness
versus British reserve. Or maybe his movie-star past made him more at ease in
the public eye.
Mr. Reagan chose to disclose his Alzheimer’s disease in
a handwritten open letter in 1994, accompanied by an explanatory letter from his
doctors. He, too, had experienced memory loss for a couple of years, and once
he got the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he and Nancy Reagan considered how much to
say.
“In opening our hearts, we hope this might
promote greater awareness of this condition,” his letter said. “Perhaps it will
encourage a clearer understanding of the individuals and families affected by
it.”
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, to
this day, carry a stigma that most other diseases — heart failure, for example
— do not. To my mind, Mr. Reagan’s public disclosure showed courage, as Betty
Ford’s candor about her breast cancer and her substance abuse did 20 years
before.
Mrs. Thatcher’s family, on the other hand, has
never discussed her diagnosis — whether she had vascular dementia from the
earlier strokes or some other form of the disease. Perhaps she forbade her
children to offer details about her illness, or perhaps by the time her
condition was clear she was no longer able to make such decisions. We may never
know.
But we do know that dementia will become an
increasingly common condition in coming years, that it’s a terminal disease
which doesn’t respect the public stature or intellectual accomplishments of its
victims, that it can cause families to grieve for the people they’ve lost long
before they die.
Paula Span is the author of
“When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and
Solutions.”
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