Journey to Senility

When Trudy’s great-aunt Gertrude takes a devastating fall and receives a dementia diagnosis, Trudy steps into a role she never imagined: full-time caregiver to a woman whose sharp tongue and decades of simmering bitterness have pushed everyone away. Life with Gertrude is equal parts exhausting and absurd. The diagnosis has not softened her edges. If anything, the filters are completely gone, and Trudy finds herself navigating a minefield of caustic remarks, unpredictable outbursts, and the kind of raw, unfiltered honesty that only the very young and the very old seem willing to unleash on the world.But Trudy finds something never meant to turn up. Tucked away in Gertrude’s closet, are secrets-the kind that rewrite everything Trudy thought she understood about her family. Suddenly, a lifetime of bitterness looks less like a personality flaw and more like a wound that never healed. With Gertrude’s memory slipping away faster than Trudy can piece the puzzle together, she faces an agonizing race against time. Can she unlock the truth before the one person who holds the answers loses the ability to give them?Tender, funny, and achingly honest, Journey to Senility is a story about the complicated love between women across generations, the secrets families bury, and the grace it takes to offer peace to someone who never made it easy to love them. It is a book about showing up, about forgiveness that arrives too late and just in time, and about the quiet dignity of walking someone gently toward the end of their story. Readers who have ever cared for someone they struggled to understand will find their own hearts reflected in every page. 6