Whiskey Dementia

Whiskey Dementia By Dom Lopez Sarah Lawley works at Dale’s Ice Cream Shop for what she hopes is her last summer in Colorado. She expresses to her boss her dreams of studying acting at Juilliard. The doorbell clings. Lisa Lawley walks in with a damp tissue, mourning the recent death of Grandma Lawley. After the funeral, she pushes her daughter to stay in the city. She needs someone to look over her drinking habits. But Sarah has already bought her plane ticket to New York. For a moment, she can enter her fantasy and escape her mother’s conceited pessimism. After her audition, she returns to Colorado to find her mother in a car accident. Lisa is just a little bruised up, but her behavior has started to fall off. Sarah is in denial when her mother can’t remember their neighbor and starts leaving her keys in the fridge. Maybe a prescription of memory enhancement pills can fix this. When things get harder for Lisa, Sarah starts to lose sight of her dream so she can stay in Denver to care for her mother. A daughter should always be there for their mother, right? Sarah takes up another job at the grocery store to pay for the hospital bills. She despises it. Lisa seems more and more detached from reality with each day, even though she still manages to attend AA meetings to monitor her alcoholism. Life is pushing hard on Sarah. Dale’s Ice Cream Shop is shutting down, she is fired from her new job at the supermarket, and she receives a letter from Juilliard informing her of her rejection. Any fleeting hope that Sarah has is finally destroyed when Lisa is officially diagnosed with Dementia. Sarah is so deep in denial that she questions Lisa’s diagnosis. Could dementia be so quick and unforgiving? Maybe they're missing a piece of the puzzle. Despite the aggressive brain disease, Lisa still insists that Sarah stay in town to help care for her. Sarah decides to tell her that she was accepted to Juilliard–just to see any sort of celebration for her daughter. Lisa begs her daughter to stay then suddenly faints under stress. Sarah drives her to the hospital. Soon after, Sarah meets an old friend on the way home. He encourages her to move to New York one final time. When Sarah comes home, she finds her neighbor crying. Lisa is missing. And she left a note. Sarah goes to the one place she knows her mother would be. In a riverbed hidden by foliage, Sarah remembers the best parts of her mother. A few weeks later, Lisa Lawley’s funeral is held despite a body never being found. Sarah, rejected from her dream and losing the only person she had in her life, heavily contemplates ending her life. She takes the bottle of pills her Mom was taking and shoves them down her throat. She goes to sleep and has one final dream of New York with her mother. But she wakes up. She’s alive. Sarah’s alive and angry. She rushes over to the hospital and confronts the doctor, who has no words. Was Lisa making the whole thing up? Sarah finds out more about Lisa’s hidden life at the AA meetings. Her mother never drank a day in her life. Maybe Sarah was a victim of abuse. She finally decides to let go of the guilt of her Mom’s death and move to New York. Even though she was rejected from Juilliard, she wants a life full of opportunity. She drives away from her house to a place called home.