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
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Things that filled me with awe this week
Featured image: Meander Canyon on the Green River—a tributary of the Colorado—in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Green vegetation blooms at the riparian zone. Photo by David Swindler, winner of the Aerial section of the National Geographic’s People’s Choice photographer of the year contest (2017). “Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, […]
Doña Quixote balks at being in two places at the same time
Featured image: Marcia Tavernese, Being in Two Places at the Same Time While our apartment management is refurbishing our unit’s air conditioner and heater this week, we have no heat this week. Accordingly, Peter and I are camped across the road from Wilmington Flats in a hotel. Camped, because we are spread over the two […]
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 […]