How Dementia Locks People Inside Their Pain
A young Denise Maso stands on the balcony of an apartment in Le Pont-de-Claix, France, where she spent most of her adult life. (Courtesy of Marion Renault)On her first night home from the hospital, between bouts of writhing in pain, my grandmother stopped to ask me, over and over, “Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait?”: “What did I do?”My grandmother, Denise, is 82 and in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, which means she can no longer form new memories.




























