in reply to @777dogwood Thank you so much. It's weird. During my walk yesterday and running into a complete stranger and exchanging phone numbers, talking about the dog she had just rescued from the SPCA, a beautiful 10 year old shiny, happy pitbull, and telling me she wanted to purchase the adjacent property that used to be a school of sorts and convert it into an assisted living place, with her living behind it, I said "oh wow, I used to volunteer for 'habitat for humanity, and I know my tools...and I will help you,' I continued on my walk and ran into another couple during which we discussed the fires in L.A and that one time I worked on the CAT team for an insurance company meeting people aside their totally burned homes, asking them how much money they wanted to 'get a room and some food etc,' and that as a result I am unable to watch the news about the fires because I know first hand what it is like to meet those who have lost everything. Their gratitude, while grief stricken was remarkable. Same with the bad hurricane in Hawaii many years ago, it was no vacation I can tell you that. Think: no power, not hot water...but the point of all of this is that later I took a picture of myself behind a wrought iron fence to remind myself that I am no longer enchained to my past, and all of a sudden the only words I could come up with at that moment were, "I am free..." While my sister still owes me several hundred dollars for the groceries she 'forgot to buy' before my arrival, at some point I will send her an email outlining the costs and see if she is willing to reimburse me. If she does not, I am not going to argue over this with her, as it is not a battle I want to fight if it saves my own sanity. I just hope that her brother in law's wife is as honest with the social worker as she was with me when I made the secret call to her during my visit. I can only say that I was blown away by what I heard. Later my sister said to me when I wanted to buy her husband a nice set of pens to use at the facility....$6 for 24 sharpie pens from Amazon( I made the mistake of thinking she could take them with her when she visited her husband,) but no....her response sounded just like it came out of my mother's mouth when I was a kid, "NO NO NO NO WHAT ARE U THINKING!" It was at that point that I realized the extent of her anger and resentment about her situation, and I have to say I walked back to my bedroom and thought to myself, "she is just like our mother, cruel..." My god, you would think she would have an ounce of gratitude that 1)husband is safe; 2)she does not have to scream at him anymore to use his walker (that she often hid from him), and 3) there is no hope. I was involved in the recent study that the MC did for lucid moments in dementia patients because I used to care for my best friend, and I can say with 100 percent certainty that with some prompts, my friend is doing 100 percent better than my brother in law because all she needs is a prompt and she is taken back decades telling me all kinds of stories about her childhood, the war, and how she survived her own awful childhood. The way things look now, it does not appear that my sister's family has any concept of dementia, or they have remained in deep denial about their father's condition. While in the guestroom I saw a card and gift certificate laying on the desk and it said, "Mom, I got this for all of us to go have a 'spa' day, and I can pick up dad and we can all have a massage." I thought, how awful, given my brother in law is confined to a wheelchair and has no clue what a massage is, even tho he used to get them predementia. I wonder how many other families like this deal with the deep denial, which I found cruel. I could only imagine what my sister felt when she saw that gift certificate, as I thought if any one needed a spa day it was my sister, not her husband.....now I am a bit sorry I did not take it with me along with a treasure of other documents, pictures, tools and other stuff that my sister will never even miss, given they were packed in a box in the garage...shaking my head because all of this feel like a bad movie that keeps getting scarier, but I am glad I not playing any role....now and never. Thank you for your kindness and support.