Day twelve: we asked for the documents — and met a closed door
Twelve days after the forced admission, the family formally asked the municipality for the documents. The answer: you will not receive them.
Today is day twelve. Trudy is still in the locked facility in Amsterdam, and her wish is unchanged: she wants to go home.
A formal request
From the very first day, the family has asked for one thing that ought to be self-evident: the documents on which the forced admission rests. The court order. The medical statement. The papers that explain why an 82-year-old woman was taken from her own home on 6 July.
That request was not made once, but again and again — verbally on the day itself, and afterwards in writing to the municipality.
The answer
Today a written answer came from the municipality. Its essence is that the requested documents will not be provided to the family. They were, it is stated, delivered by another route — and as far as the municipality is concerned, the matter is now closed.
So, twelve days after the admission, two things stand at once. The municipality states that the documents were provided. And Trudy herself says, in her own words and time after time, that she has never seen them.
Both cannot be true in the way that counts: that the woman at the centre of all this holds, in her own hand, the papers that determine her freedom.
What a closed door means
A closed admission is the gravest measure the state can take against a person: removing someone from her own home against her will and holding her there. Such a measure carries, as its counterweight, one minimal safeguard — that the person concerned and those close to her can read why.
Twelve days on, that is still absent. No documents in her hand. No telephone in her possession. A single channel through which all her contact with the outside world runs. And now an answer that, however politely worded, amounts to a closed door.
Work continues without let-up to open that door — and to bring Trudy home, where she wants to be.
Her birthday is seven days away. She ought to celebrate it at home.
This account is limited to facts and the family’s own observations, with date and source. Where an account rests on statements by the person concerned, this is indicated. Corrections of factual inaccuracies are made after verification.