It is, in fact, the entire distinction at the heart of everything that happened to me, and the thing I now spend my working life trying to protect in others.

A person’s autonomy is not really about any single decision.

It is about who holds the authorship of their own life.

When Michael tried to have me declared incompetent, he was not trying to make one choice for me; he was trying to seize the pen, to become the author of my remaining years, to move me and my money and my home around like pieces on a board he controlled.

And the reason it enraged me so completely, underneath the fear and the grief, was that authorship of my own life was the one thing I had never surrendered to anyone in seventy-one years.