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
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 […]
In Las Vegas my dementia wins, I lose
Lonely Girl Room 315, detail. Sculpture from Constance McBride’s The Lonely Girls project (2011-2014). My frequent failures in what used to be easy daily tasks constantly remind me that my days of still having some life-of-the-mind and relative independence are running out. No wonder, then, that I was deeply moved by Constant McBride’s Lonely Girls sculpture collection. The […]
Days when dementia is not the worst of my (micro)vascular disease
Featured image, Rosa Verloop, nylon sculptures This is going to be a “woe is me” post about a topic that we usually keep firmly behind the bathroom door. Therefore, if you don’t want to hear about the degradation of my digestive system, get out now. If, however, you also have an annoying, embarrassing, or otherwise very […]
Dementia Field Notes: How shallow lies the anger in my bosom
Why did the arrival of this package at our front door make me so angry? Because of what it looked like on the outside, I was angry enough not to want to open the box. These were my runaway THOUGHTS when I saw the images and words printed on it: Oh no, someone is […]
“To say goodbye is to die a little”: Part II
This post is Part II of my long goodbye to my forever-in-progress novel Last Pietà. Part I, my previous post, consisted of historical information about Michelangelo’s life, the stunning facts that intrigued me so much that I just had to write Last Pietà. It introduced the sculpture of my book’s title, on which the artist worked until […]
“To say goodbye is to die a little”: Part I
The title of this post is from The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. The goodbye on my mind is one of my own. It has been 1 year—no, 6 years, 11 years? almost 30 years?—in the making. Or shall I say, “470 years?,” thereby vaingloriously linking my major and final fiction writing effort to the last […]