Foreword

• Library: Alzheimer's and the Practice of Law: Counseling Clients with Dementia and Their Families (ABA) (2013 Ed.)

FOREWORD

In my new novel, Identical, Tim Brodie, an elderly private investigator who hopes to unravel the mysteries of a murder that took place nearly three decades before visits a nursing home so he can interview Lidia Gianis, 87, a woman Tim has known for years but who is now deeply in the grip of dementia:

"Is he my husband?" Lidia asked Eloise, her attendant, as Tim entered.
"Oh no, honey. He just a friend." Eloise propped Lidia up in the leatherette recliner. "You all go head and visit. I'm just outside, case you need me."
Tim sat down in a wooden-armed chair a few feet from Lidia.
"Do I know you?" she asked Tim.
"Tim Brodie, Lidia. We met a million years ago at St. D's."
"I don't know you," she said. "I had a stroke and my memory is not so good."
"Yeah, well, my memory isn't what it once was either. "
In thirty years on the police force, and twenty five since then as a P.I., Tim had done lots of interviews under daunting circumstances, questioning children and the mentally handicapped, and naturally enough, the desperately bereaved. But this would be a new chapter and Tim had no idea how to start.
On Lidia's bedside table, there were photographs of her two daughters and of her twin sons and a passel of kids.
"Now who are all these

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