My Life with Dementia
My name is Gerda Saunders. Since I was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at age 61, I have publicly spoken about my mental deterioration in a blog, book, and short films produced by RadioWest. Using footage from 2016 to 2022, RadioWest and PBS Utah jointly produced an hour-long documentary, The Gerda That Remains. It portrays how I, my husband Peter, my children, my grandchildren, and friends experience the erosion of my identity through memory loss. While revealing what remains of my former self and what I continuously have to let go, it also shows how we have lived joyously for over a decade with the d-word.
Blog Posts
“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 […]
Dementia Filed Notes: Is my stick just schtick?
While I diligently work all the time to reduce my material possessions, I have recently added and item that falls under the category “could live without it.” It is just very nice to have: my telescoping cane from independent living.com. I chose it over the blingy or artsy ones that I’d most definitely have preferred […]
Dementia Field Notes resumed: entry wounds
Featured image: Maria Lassnig, Dame mit Hirn (Woman with Brain), 1990. When I retired from my job as the associate director of and a teacher in Gender Studies nine months after being diagnosed with young-onset dementia (2010), my colleagues gave me a beautiful leather-bound journal, the gilt-splotched kind with pen-friendly, unlined paper. For the first months of my retirement, […]
Once upon a grocery store I met an artist who paints what she sees: meet Lorna Anderson
Once upon a grocery store, a man came to me and said, “I love your haircut.” Beside him was a woman, smiling her delight at maybe my hair (now that I know she was a hair stylist I sort of doubt it)—more likely her adoration of her man, who saw something he liked and did […]
The gift of the Magi, sort of
When dementia had shrunk my mother’s world to a bedroom, corridors to walk, a dining room and—on weekends, holidays, and other celebratory occasions—the homes of her children, food remained for her a compelling interest. She would sit at the table, deaf to attempts at communication, but very attentive to what was on her plate or […]
Utah rebroadcast of the PBS film “The Gerda That Remains” on May 5, 7 pm AND May 9, 11 pm
As you, my readers, may have noticed, I have not posted on my website for over two months. Part of the reason was happy: after the February release of the PBS film The Gerda That Remains, (a documentary about how Peter and I and our family manage to still live joyfully 11 years after my dementia diagnosis), I […]