My name is Gerda Saunders, I have dementia. From 2016 to 2022, RadioWest and/or PBS Utah recorded how my family and I strive to live joyously despite my loss of memory and identity. From this footage they produced the 1-hour documentary, The Gerda That Remains
Latest Blog Posts
13 years out from my dementia diagnosis, 6 days out from my surgery, Peter and I are celebrating 52 years of marriage
Photo: March 27, 1971. Fifty-two years married, Peter and I, 55 years together if you add the 3 years of “living in sin” before our wedding day. How can two human beings be so lucky! Not that it all was Pimm’s and frangipani (as in “wine and roses”), because, like anyone else, we had our […]
“The hill, though high, I covet to ascend.” Bring on my surgery! Let Doña Quixote be my biggest difficulty again!
Featured image: An engraving of the journey made by the pilgrim in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), titled A Plan of the Road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. Title includes a quote from Pilgrim’s Progress. The wait is over, let the surgery begin. My pre-op visit at the University of Utah was […]
Gerda keeps busy to make the time to her surgery fly. Doña Quixote is a fly in Gerda’s hoped-for absinthe
Featured image: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931 How do I make the time go faster before my pelvic floor prolapse surgery on March 21? How do I take my mind off my crowded pelvic floor, where too many organs are rubbing each other the wrong way? Psychologists from the National Institute of Mental Health […]
As Gerda hits bottom, Doña Quixote wonders whether one more surgery isn’t too much
Featured image: Cephalophore (saint carrying her own severed head), Jia Sung “Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life.” No more annual exams, cancer screenings, mammograms, and any other measure […]
Denumbered by dementia, Doña Quixote counts her toilet paper squares and her Winter Solstice blessings
Featured image: Picasso, Blind Minotaur Guided by a Girl in the Night, etching (1934). The New Year arrived this morning in Salt Lake City like a blank slate, a snow-whitened landscape whose underlying structure is only hinted at by a palimpsest of dendritic trees. Today is as pervaded with lightness as the winter solstice season […]
Gerda and I, aka, her dementia, have now become one
Featured image: Alice, illustration by Gianlucci Gambino, aka, Te Nia In the immediate aftermath of my dementia diagnosis twelve years ago (2011), it made sense to separate my then-still-comparatively-rational self from the disease and look at it from the outside. That is when (almost subconsciously) I created Doña Quixote, my demented alter ego, from whom […]