It happened more than a decade ago, but the moment remains with her.
Sara Stewart was talking at the dining room table with her mother, Barbara Cole, 86, in Bar Harbor, Maine. Ms. Stewart, then 59, a lawyer, was making one of her extended visits from out of state.
Two or three years earlier, Ms. Cole had begun showing troubling signs of dementia, probably from a series of small strokes. “I didn’t want to yank her out of her home,” Ms. Stewart said.