She has packed her bags and waited patiently to be picked up and taken “home”, not to the house where she lived with us, but to the deep past. We looked after her for two years until it became obvious that family life was hindering, not helping. It came to a point when the context we provided – one that we’d naively thought would be comforting – became the greatest source of her unhappiness: the constant striving to make sense of it, resisting the facts, insisting the things people told her (that she was 80, that she was a grandmother, that she was retired, that she had married, that the old man sitting next to her was her husband) couldn’t be true. Photograph: Maja Daniels/Picturetank