Gerda Saunders's Blog: Field Notes on My Dementia, page 9

Cheryl Saunders, guest post about coronavirus: “We cannot control the world, but we can control where we put our focus”

Featured image: Australian Aboriginal artist Helen Milroy’s The Dance of Life (2006) reflects a multi-dimensional model of health and wellbeing from an Aboriginal perspective. All other art in this post is by Milroy. My beloved daughter-in-law Cheryl Saunders  wrote the letter below to our family and friends in this time of coronavirus caution and, alas, panic. […]

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The seat of memory: home is where the couch is

As ideas for this post churned in my mind, I gathered some objects I have cherished as memorabilia throughout my life—we brought them along in the ships’ container when we emigrated—and took a photo of them: serving as the display surface is the riempies chair, (one of the eight around the table our family used […]

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Winter solstice, “the night when whatever direction you go, you’ll be walking toward the dawn”

Title quote from “Blessing for the Longest Night,” Jan Richardson. Featured image by Peter, “2019 Saunders Family.” I write this in the season of …the winter solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future (Margaret Atwood, “Shape […]

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Undiagnosis: I am so upset I can’t even joke about it…

…but, after many weeks, I’m attempting to at least write about it: I have been UNDIAGNOSED: I almost certainly don’t have microvascular disease, which—for the past 9 years—my doctors and I had thought to be the reason for my dementia symptoms. The shock of undiagnosis came last month, when the results of a recent MRI […]

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Aliya Saunders, 9 years old, guest post: “This is about my ouma and oupa and me”

    Ouma and Oupa come to see me shoot goals at my soccer game                               Sometimes I play goalie                                            […]

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A RadioWest “Staff Pick”: short film series about Gerda and her family’s life with dementia

Featured photo: The RadioWest team, Elaine Clark, Kelsie Moore, Doug Fabrizio, Benjamin Bombard RadioWest and I go way back. In 2001, Doug Fabrizio interviewed me on his then brand-new “intelligent” show about my book of short stories that dealt with my family’s emigration from South Africa to Utah. Doug had thoroughly read my book (no, […]

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Doña Quixote gets a makeover

Featured image: Cosmopolitan: skeleton makeup tutorial In August 2016, I signed the contract that granted Hachette Books the rights to publish Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia. It came out in June 2017. During the writing of my book, I created a character, Doña Quixote, to represent my demented alter ego. On her […]

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Peter and Gerda at work and play in San Antonio

Last Saturday, June 15th, Peter and I participated in the “Building Partnerships for Geriatric Care: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Symposium” in San Antonio. The main organizer of the conference—and the person who invited me to speak— was Carole White, a professor in Nursing at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research focus is to […]

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Kindle version of Memory’s Last Breath on sale for $2.99 this week through AlzAuthors

AlzAuthors is a non-profit organization that promotes books written by people with dementia or their caretakers. It was started in 2015 by authors Marianne Sciucco, Jean Lee, and Vicki Tapia, each of them having taken care of parents with dementia and written a book about it. In time three more authors joined them and together they promoting […]

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The link to Gerda’s talk with “being patient” last month

Here is a link to my interview with Deborah Kan on “being patient.” The show was podcast live. The link takes you to a transcription. The transcription page has the video link in it–just scroll down on “being patient’s” website.

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