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?

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. What none of us could have predicted then was that Bayley’s memoirs would start a vogue that finds us, a decade later, awash with a pornography of incontinence.

They’re all at it. The better-known rush to detail the decline of those whom they love or, at any rate, loved. Alan Bennett and Roy Hattersley weighed in soon after Bayley on their mothers, as did author Jill Murphy on hers, when she confided to an interviewer that the whole house was daily soaked in urine. More recently, Cliff Richard, Carol Thatcher and Fiona Phillips have gone public with their parents’ dementia, as did this week John Suchet, with his wife’s. Meanwhile the unknown compensate for their lack of fame by posing with their hollow-eyed charges for newspapers that really ought to know better including, in this month alone, the Times and the Independent.