I can’t even explain how she ended up here. Shaking and crying in the fetal position, I watched from the glass one-way mirror. Even if she were to drift back into the consciousness of the real world, slowly she would return to being an empty shell of who she once was. They had taken everything that made her unique.


A self-made millionaire who came from nothing, well at least what just about every paper or magazine said about her. Though I beg to differ, they all make it sound like she lived in extreme poverty on the streets of some ghetto with a family that didn’t give her the love that she deserved. Bulls***. She had all the support one person could possibly need. In fact, she had some holding her hand as she took baby steps. And our house may not have been in the best of places, but it was a home .


The people who strung together these lies were the ones responsible for how fast she fell from the top. She was no longer known as a woman who did good, she was only a way for them to sell more issues of the slander that made someone in a corner office richer. Plastering her every step on the insides of their covers. I never understood how they could print such a character assassinations and get away with it.


Over time it broke her down seeing all these lies being written and having every single detail of her personal life be exposed to people who she would never come face to face with. She slowly turned into a ghost; a hollow shell. Piece by piece they stripped her of her personality. Piece by piece they dismantled her soul. Until one day she was nothing. Her body was no more than a sack of blood and bones, just a name paired with a face.


They came knocking on our door. Pretty much like the scene in the movies, two guys in white lab coats coming to drag her off some far off distant world. They dragged her down our front steps with her limbs flailing in all directions. She screamed for me to save her, but I had done everything in my power to keep her sane. It had been an impossible task. I just watched, arms folded, as they loaded her into the van.


In the place she went to, they broke her down even more stripping her identity from beneath her. This was a no touching zone, no fiscal contact. No hugging during visitation. That had been the only reason I knew she was still there after the years of caring for her. The hardest part was leaving her every visit. Leaving your sister in that room of four padded walls of white.