Chapter 24 — The Dementia That Wasn’t

There is one part of this story that still fills me with a rage I have had to work hard to set down, and it is this: the severe dementia my sister had described, to me and to the tenants and to anyone who would listen, the condition that had supposedly justified keeping my mother sedated and hidden away, had never really existed at all.

After three months of intensive medical detoxification, of physical therapy, and of proper nutrition and rest and daylight, my mother’s mind had cleared to a degree that astonished her doctors.

Because the severe dementia had been, in overwhelming part, not dementia at all, but a drug-induced delirium, a fog manufactured entirely by the high daily doses of black-market sedatives my sister had been feeding her.