Do the words ‘to lose a parent’ mean something different to the children of dementia sufferers?
Mamie Baird Magnusson died in April, 2012, aged 86. Her children had already been grappling with her loss for more than a decade. The warm, sparky, strong and inquisitive woman who had piloted their lives had gradually receded from view as dementia dimmed her sharp mind.
In her place was a frail old lady, in need of round-the-clock care, whose frustration at her failure to comprehend the world around her sometimes manifested itself in anger, even anguish.
For those who had known her, dementia seemed a particularly cruel end-of-life sentence for a woman whose lively intellect had been her passport to success. Mamie Baird had been a star writer on the Scottish Daily Express.
The joke when she married her junior colleague Magnus Magnusson – who would later find fame as the original Mastermind inquisitor – was that he was after her job.
‘She loved words and taught her children to cherish them, too,’ writes her broadcaster daughter, Sally. ‘Then, little by little, she lost them.’
