Vicki Matthews has always been a sharp woman — she was a librarian, well-read and fond of words. But about 10 years ago, her family noticed that she was growing more forgetful. She started losing track of where she was going or where she had just been. Then, she was forgetting to pay bills, or sometimes double-paying them.

It took years for Matthews to receive a formal diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Today, she is in the moderate stages of the disease, although you might not know it right away.

“She can frequently fool people,” Matthews’ daughter, Romi Lessig said, sitting on the couch at her mother’s house in Austin. “They’ll think, ‘Oh, we had this great conversation.’ And they’ll come back to her an hour later and she’ll look at them [blankly].”

“It’s a good excuse,” Matthews quipp

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