This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Denise Mazzo spent most of her adult life in a two bedroom apartment in Granoble France.

She raised two kids there while working at a factory and then a daycare.

It's where she sewed Halloween costumes and dress suits for her family and settled in to her retirement.

But old age has been difficult for her.

In 2013, Denise, my grandmother, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

As the disease stripped away her memory and cognition, it also shrank the world around her.

She stopped driving, so we sold her car.

And after decades of feeding her family, she stopped cooking,

and her kitchen became another room to wander through.

Once it wasn't safe or healthy for her to spend her days alone and disoriented,

we moved Memy Denise to a specialized memory care unit in a nursing home near Grenoble.

Where she lives now is more like a hospital than like a home.

The doors are locked by key pads. The overhead lights are The

overhead lights are fluorescent.

There's no living room, just a central space with a row of scratched up tables and an

area with medical armchairs lined up in front of a TV.

Her only private space is a small bedroom located in one corner of the ward, which she can't

leave by herself.

She tells us she's not home, but somewhere else.

This is what most dementia care looks like in the Western world.

For decades society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating medicalized environments.

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