That fear had been wrong.

The mind, the doctors told me, is remarkably resilient when the thing suppressing it is removed; clear the chemicals, restore the nutrition and the rest and the human contact, and a great deal of what looked like permanent decline can lift, sometimes astonishingly.

My mother’s recovery was, in the end, a testament to that resilience.

But the rage came from the flip side of the same fact: that because the damage was so largely reversible, it meant the fog had never been a disease to be endured.

It had been a cage, built and maintained on purpose, refreshed daily, dose by dose, by a person who could have stopped at any moment and did not.