As Our Parents Age

Dementia, Thatcher’s Privacy, and What It’s Really Like

Learn more about the movie at IMDB.

Last night about 20 minutes into watching The Iron Lady interact with her dead husband, I leaned over to my husband and exclaimed, “Now I really understand what it was like was for your mother — she saw those things.”

This movie is about dementia, not history.

Lady Thatcher’s conversations with her husband Denis, were real to her, though she knew they weren’t. Time after time, as we sat together to eat or read, Mother would mention to my husband that her visions — that’s what Mother called them — were real enough to touch when they occurred. She, too, knew they were not real, but she could now get away from them.

By the time the movie ended, I sat quietly thinking to myself that I had just seen a rerun of the last year of his mother’s life with dementia — the confusion, the attempts to blot out things that you don’t like, the inability of the doctor to do much more than talk, the wary eyeing of the pills on the teacup saucer, the reveries over nearby photos, an unexpected feat of expressing thoughts with crystal clarity, and how music — in this case The King and I — seemed to calm and distract. Even the shots of Thatcher overhearing others talk about her, brought back memories of Mother snapping, “I’m right here,” when we discussed a treatment and forgot to include her.

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January 15, 2012 Posted by Marti Weston | aging changes, aging parents, Alzheimer's, Brain, Caregiving, Dementia, memory | aging, aging parents, Alzheimer's, brain disease, Caregiving, Dementia, Great Britain, Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Thatcher movie, Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady | 1 Comment