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
Peter shows Doña Quixote two images and now she’s singing the blues
Featured image: In 2019, Joel Shapiro’s sculpture Blue was installed outside the Kennedy Center as a joyful and welcoming feature for a new extension of D.C.’s major national performing arts venue. “Shapiro’s monumental aluminum sculpture is about to run, to leap, or to kick an illusory soccer ball across the wide Potomac to Robert E. […]
Why fire-swailed Doña Quixote squinches at the fashion advice “dress for the woman you’re becoming (Not the one you were)”
Featured image: Evening, Tchabalala Self, 2019. Self’s painting incorporates mixed-media such acrylic and paint on canvas to create a textured, collaged effect. Self’s work is known for examining the human figure, specifically manipulating bodily scale and shape to address themes of identity and expression. Title: I came upon 2 Janus words, “fire-swailed” and “squinch, ” […]
Gerda’s temporary inability to walk diagnosed—”A glass key: be sure it doesn’t break in your hand”
Featured image: The Glass Key, René Magritte, 1959. It portrays a cracked (bottom left edge) boulder “floating” just above where the stone balances on the mountain ridge. There is no glass in the painting. I the painting’s title, Magritte intended for “glass” to be symbolic for “fragility,” the boulder for “key.” The artist thought about […]
“All I wanted was to be a pea/ of being inside the green pod of time”
Title: Lines from Billy Collins’s poem “In the Moment” Featured image: Birth (Gunpowder Works), 1981), Ana Mendieta “a pea/ of being inside the green pod of time” While drowning in the Sturm und Drang of my pre- and post back-surgery wretchedness, I most of all desired a restorative interval of quiet in my soul. […]
“Pain does not run just along the body but also seizes the mind,” or, How a “lucky-to-get” clinic appointment thrust Gerda into the arms of Doña Quixote
Featured image: An illustration titled Birdman by Frits Ahlefeldt (1966), a Danish hiker and walking philosopher: “I’m wondering about this world, about us and what we do and think making drawn stories and research about the benefits of walking both in words and drawings.” He publishes his drawings at the “Museum of Psychology.” The illustration […]
“The black angel…forces open my hands /and in the palms/leaves her footprints”
Featured image: Black angel in the Aurora consurgens (Dawn Rising) illuminated manuscript held at Zentralbibliothek Zürich in Switzerland, a 15th-century illuminated alchemical document, with its oldest, most heavily illustrated version dating to approximately 1420-1430. Its author is unknown. Post title: Quote from the poem “The Black Angel” by Michael S Harper (1938-2016). He wrote his […]
To stave off dread, the Doña tries to keep on locomoting like “The Little Engine That Could”….
Featured image: Peter AI’ed the image from a grumpy photo of me and a meme about The Little Engine That Could You’d think, past sixty or so, the unconscious would give you some respite. But here, it says, is the little engine of dread and sorrow that runs your story —Robert Hass, “John Muir, A […]