Carol Sarler

There is no dignity in this Alzheimer’s parade

In the week that John Suchet made his wife’s dementia public, Carol Sarler questions this revelatory trend. Is it really what the sufferers would have wanted?

issue 21 February 2009

In the week that John Suchet made his wife’s dementia public, Carol Sarler questions this revelatory trend. Is it really what the sufferers would have wanted?

Her end, when it came, was beyond ghastly. Iris Murdoch, one of our doughtier literary intellects, was reduced to screaming, drooling delirium at one end of her frail body and to defecation without any sense of suitable time or place at the other. All of this we know because, exactly 10 years ago, her husband told us, when he wrote of ‘the lady whom I sat on the loo this morning, wiped her bottom and scrubbed her hands and her brown fingernails’.

John Bayley’s book was a lucrative best-seller and its film a box office success, sweeping up an Oscar for Jim Broadbent, playing Bayley, as well as nominations for Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet who both played Murdoch. Not a bad haul, you might think, for one demented old darling — even though, at the time, I did write of my own unease that this might not, in fact, have been quite the tribute she would have wanted.

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