The full writing can be read directly from the Pulitzer website for free by simply expanding the + symbol to the right of the article name.

This writing by Katie Engelhart of The New York Times won the 2024 Pulitzer prize in the ‘Feature Writing’ category. It talks about a topic I’m sure that hits way too close at home for many: dementia. Katie follow two sisters’ journey in Denison, Iowa as they fight for guardianship over their mother, Diane. Fearing that her mother is being elderly abused and taken advantage of due to her financial wealth along with what they believe is her inability to make the right choices for herself, the sisters begin a fight that would last many years and ultimately, cost a lot of money along with heartaches.

What’s most shocking to me about this story is how we have the ability as a civilization to send spaceships into space and collect rock samples from different planets yet still unable to crack the biggest mystery of them all: the human brain and what makes us who we are. Does a better lawyer or one who is more experienced in debating get to define whether a person is cognitive enough to make the right choices to not harm themselves? Is it the doctors and nurses who run tests on their patients? I’d have believed that cases like what is covered in this article happens enough around the world that there would likely be some sort of standardized methodology and process in court or other systems to handle it.

This is such a sad story to read yet highly entertaining in that with reality and not some fantasy world, it’s hard to judge who is mostly in the right or wrong. At first, I’d assume the sisters were fighting the good fight, but as the story progressed, it seems like they were using their grudge against their mother’s boyfriend as a way to prolong the fight even though some accusations they made against him couldn’t be proven. Was he wrong in trying so hard to separate the sisters from their mother? All the while, their mother was made to suffer the most. With her disease, it was like a reoccurring nightmare day in and day out. Dementia sucks so bad.