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Introduction

In the hospital, I sat with my father. He was dead. A heart attack, they said. He collapsed at home. But I don’t know exactly where he died—my mother says she doesn’t remember. His body told a different story. The coroner’s report later noted three long deep cuts on his forehead. I saw bruising on his neck. The police asked us to wait in a room while they examined him. Back at my parents’ house, I began cleaning up—so much blood. I searched for whatever he had fallen against, the object that had cut his head, so I could wipe that clean too. The coffee table? The mantelpiece? It took me six weeks to find the dull red stains—on an unexpected ornament.

“The blood was all over.”

“But I scrubbed and bleached it.”

My daughter added, “I can still see it.”

I am unravelling a mystery—how did my father die? This is a personal investigation, piecing together fragments of the past, searching for answers in photographs, letters, and objects. My mother, who now has dementia, holds some of the truth, but her recollections tend to slip through her fingers.

I return to what remains, the documents, photos, dairies each one a clue leading to a different version of events. There is a wound in this story—one that refuses to heal. The true story of my father’s death is something I may never understand. And yet, I keep looking, searching for the thread that might tie it all together. The faded marks on the wall are still there, waiting to be deciphered. Someone tried to erase them—but they left traces.

Crime Scene or Accident?

When my mother began to lose her short-term memory to dementia, I lost my last witness. Her past unravelled in fragments. I had always positioned her as a victim of my father’s control and violence. But had I seen the full picture? Could the birth certificates, the woods, and the old holiday house provide clues? Each image is a piece of the puzzle—an attempt to reconstruct what was never spoken. The truth is fractured. A History of Vanishing is not just about memory loss, but about concealed histories within a family.

Motive

Coercive control isn’t just about violence—it’s about domination. My father ruled through silence, through moods that shaped the atmosphere of the house. We learned to anticipate his needs before he voiced them. We knew when to disappear. School, the stables, and the woods became our sanctuaries. At home, we sought permission just to exist in his space. He isolated us— making the outside world feel unsafe. Friends weren’t welcome. If he earned the money and owned the house, he believed he had the right to dictate everything. His opinions became law. Any challenge—however small—was met with beatings, fury, or a chilling withdrawal.

He hit often. This kind of control creeps in, layer by layer. I wonder if, one day, my mother simply couldn’t take any more.

A voice whispers, But she isn’t a good person either, is she?

Blood Traces

My parents had a troubled marriage. I told the police about the coercion, the financial control. They asked about physical violence. My mother said she’d once been in hospital after a fight and told the nurse she had tripped. The nurse didn’t believe her. We moved to a detached house. It allowed his rages to continue. An Englishman’s home is his castle.

In our family, we had myths—carefully maintained narratives. What would happen if I broke the silence and documented what I believe happened the night my father died? I do not think it was a simple heart attack. To make sense of it, I need to examine the longer arc of their relationship. They were both born during World War II. Perhaps the roots of what happened lie there—in inherited wounds. 

The War

If I could understand my father, would I uncover the origin of his need to dominate? He was an only child. His mother, Alice, a gentle woman from a village in Derbyshire, knew all the country names for flowers. Even now, a plant’s name will come to me—arriving like a whisper. I know it’s her voice. She was my safe place. With her, I spent long days in the horse fields. She seemed to calm him. I was thirteen when she died.

After that, he changed. He began to shape himself in the image of his own father—the man he had once resented, now rewritten as a hero. A man who had been angry and bombastic, who collected German ration books and weapons, needed redesigning. “The war changed him,” my father would say. But he never knew the man before the war.

He needed to transform that legacy. He abandoned birdwatching and became a man obsessed with cars and control. He bought a new one every nine months and washed it twice a day, as though the gleaming surface was the only thing he could truly manage.

His grandfather had belonged to a men-only club. His great-grandfather was a Mason in Karachi. In the family box of birth certificates and wills, I saw a pattern—a lineage built on secrecy and dominance. They passed down a cigar box from man to man, topped with a captive bear that danced when the key was turned. I wonder if the need to hold power is an inheritance that runs deep. My mother’s story was different.

Background Check

My mother was not wanted by her own mother. We don’t know for certain who her father was. Her mother, Marion, fell for one man, married another, then divorced him and returned to her first love—Alec. She adored him. He was dangerous.

The relationship between Marion and Alec was complex. Did she fear him, or was she complicit? He wore dresses in private. He abused children. She seemed to protect him. My sister and I have a nickname for them—“Fred and Rosemary.”

My family buried their secrets in suburban gardens, behind roses and carefully chosen outfits. It’s little wonder my mother didn’t know how to parent. She didn’t touch, play, or listen. She detached. If I spoke about the abuse happening under her roof, she punished me.

So, do I think my mother was a victim? I do. But she also waged her own war. My parents’ relationship thrived on conflict, then punishing their daughters. A person can be both harmed and harmful. She once told me she’d have left if she had money or a career. She had no bank account. I asked a friend of theirs recently if she was a victim. “No,” he said. “She was strong. Always held her own.”

If only she would speak before she forgets who I am.

The Woman Who Studied Murder

My mother always insisted she’d had a good life. She spoke proudly of her status—cars, jewellery, fur coats, holidays—an image carefully constructed and fiercely protected. But inside our home, she was someone else entirely.

Confrontational. Passive-aggressive. Perhaps narcissistic. A woman who denied truth, even to herself. She ignored the wider abuse in the family, looked away from anything that didn’t fit her version of events. Omission was her weapon.

She read murder novels obsessively. How to commit the perfect crime. How to erase evidence. She believed she was clever.

After my father died—suddenly, at home—she said she didn’t remember what happened. I believed her. For a while.

But what if she wasn’t forgetting—what if she was refusing to remember? What if she did it, and did it so well that no one ever knew? No justice. No reckoning. No applause. Just silence. And for someone like her, perhaps the real punishment was that no one noticed.

This is the soil from which A History of Vanishing grows.

It’s a story told in fragments: portraits, heirlooms, faded marks on the wall, and things meant to be erased. It explores the fine line between forgetting and concealment, between memory loss and lifelong manipulation.

I don’t know what really happened the night my father died. But I keep looking. The myths that shaped our family are beginning to collapse.

The Cause of Dementia

My mother has dementia. Her mother did too, and my father’s grandmother. If the women in my family were deeply unhappy, did they need to forget? If your choices brought you shame, if change felt impossible—what might the brain do then? Can whisky and denial wear away the frontal lobes? Can you train your neural pathways to bury the past, until one day those paths collapse and die?

Recently, I worked on a six year dementia study for King’s College and UCL. My role was to humanise statistics through portraits. A portrait is a witness. It offers a glimpse of the soul and tells part of a story. I must create my mother’s portrait. But I’m afraid of what it might reveal.

Trial Adjourned

This is a journey of unearthing. Of letting go. Of making room for peace. A History of Vanishing is the story I am trying to purge. Trauma lives in the body—it keeps the score. But when we empty ourselves of its weight, we create space. And in that space, something else might take root.

I return to the wall where the stain once was. It’s faded now. But in the right light, you can still see it. Some marks refuse to vanish.

I take out my camera. It’s time to make my mother’s portrait.

Expert Witness: Soraya Lawrence, Criminal Defence Barrister

The criminal justice system provides safeguards for those accused of wrong-doing and those providing evidence of it. Any case that comes to trial follows a procedure: the prosecution presents the evidence and the jury evaluates that evidence and decides whether it makes them sure that the allegation is proven. 

But what happens when the witness, be it complainant or defendant, suffers from dementia? 

Our system depends on the ability for evidence to be presented coherently and for it to be possible for the evidence to be challenged and tested. How reliable is the witness? Does what they say stack up with other evidence? 

Is it fair to subject a defendant to the rigours of a trial when there is no way of testing the reliability of the evidence against them? 

Or, equally, when the complainant now has dementia and is unable to repeat evidence they once provided? 

In neither case does a current state of dementia make the original evidence more or less reliable. But it does render it wholly unquantifiable and, therefore,  impossible to assess.  

When complaints are made about events that happened many decades ago there are always huge obstacles. Original “scenes of crime” may have been bulldozered, other witnesses may no longer be alive, records  no longer exist.

When dementia enters the arena the fog is so absolute it cannot be penetrated.

Expert Witness: Dr. Linda Montague, Consultant Psychiatrist

What is memory? “The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information” says the dictionary. 

It isn’t infallible, though. We have probably all had the experience of thinking we remembered something accurately then finding we were wrong. A photo, someone else’s account, an object found somewhere other than where we left it… memory can fail us.

It fails some people more than others. Dementia, we call it when it’s a progressive and irreversible decline. Other things fail too; word processing, facial recognition, the ability to sequence thoughts and activities.

“How is your father?” said my aunt to my mother when we visited her. There was a moment of stunned silence as we processed this in the face of the fact that their father had died in 1945. Then aunt said “Oh, I think I am getting mixed up”. Insight, we call that in the trade. 

Yet there are moments of clarity too. My father was well advanced in his dementia when I met my husband-to-be. I introduced him to my father every time we met, and every time he forgot who this strange man was. And then one day my father said, out of the blue “That’s a good man you’ve got yourself there!”. My husband wasn’t even with us. But something had gone into my father’s mind and stayed. 

Suppose a relative with dementia told you something terrible. A secret they had carried for years. Could you believe them? Might it not be their secret but someone else’s that they had learnt and muddled into their own life? Might it be a terrible fantasy, released by the disinhibition of their cognitive decline? Or might it be real?

One of my patients turned up at a police station and told them he had killed a child many years earlier. The police got very excited, searched his house, looked through missing child records, interviewed him… his story didn’t hang together, he couldn’t provide any further detail, there was no firm evidence, no missing child matching the story at the relevant time. It went no further. Who knows what happened? What was he remembering? 

Memory. We can’t manage without it, yet it is slippery and unreliable and can let us down when we need it most. In the end, our past can be as unknowable as our future.