“Outside of law it’s four in the morning and you’re going to lie awake,” she said. “I can’t help you with that part. I’ve been doing this thirty-one years and I’ve never once been able to help anybody with that part.”

The evaluations took five weeks.

Vascular dementia, moderate, with a contributing history of alcohol use — a series of small strokes over probably four years, plus nine years of drinking that nobody in the family had described as drinking.

Not Alzheimer’s. It comes in steps rather than a slope, which means he has good days that are very good, and it means every plateau feels like recovery to everyone who loves him and is not one.

The finances were worse than the diagnosis.

Richard Whitaker had eleven thousand dollars in checking, a reverse mortgage on the Wash Park house eating it from underneath, and Social Security. That was it.