Mrs. Thatcher was known as the "Iron Lady" for tough-talking rhetoric and

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Last weekend, Britons received the same shocking news, when CarolThatcher, daughter of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher,described how her mother has suffered from growing dementia foreight years.
In an excerpt from her new book, A Swim-On Part in the GoldfishBowl: A Memoir, serialized in the Mail on Sunday newspaper, Ms.Thatcher describes how she first noticed her mother's memory wasfailing when she lunched with her at a hotel overlooking London'sHyde Park in 2000.
During their meal, Lady Thatcher's conversation became confused andshe muddled the Falklands War with the conflict in the Balkans, herdaughter writes.
"I almost fell off my chair. Watching her struggle with her wordsand her memory, I couldn't believe it. She was in her 75th year butI had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100% cast-irondamage-proof."
"The contrast was all the more striking because, until that point,she'd always had a memory like a Web site," she adds.
During her political career, Mrs. Thatcher (she was created abaroness in 1992) was known as the "Iron Lady" for tough-talkingrhetoric and ruthless self-control.
"She could rise from the front bench in an economic debate andrecite the rate of inflation all the way back to William Gladstonewithout a note," her daughter says.
But Lady Thatcher, now 82, is increasingly frail and finds herselffloundering in the simplest conversation.
"On bad days, she could hardly remember the beginning of a sentenceby the time she got to the end," her daughter says.
"That's the worst thing about dementia: it gets you every time,"Ms. Thatcher says.
"Sufferers look and act the same but beneath the familiar exteriorsomething quite different is going on. They're in another world andyou can not enter."
While her mother has occasional flashes of lucidity during whichshe can happily recall some events during her term as Britain'sprime minister in 1979-90, she struggles to remember more recentevents.
Losing her husband, Sir Dennis Thatcher, to pancreatic cancer in2003 "was truly awful" for her mother, Ms. Thatcher writes, "notleast because her dementia meant she kept forgetting he was dead."
"I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again," shewrites.
"Every time, it finally sank in that she had lost her husband ofmore than 50 years, she'd look at me sadly and say