My Life with Dementia
My name is Gerda Saunders. At age 61, I was diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Thanks to my husband Peter, my children, my grandchildren, and others who love me, I’ve lived joyously for almost a decade with the d-word. I call my dementia “Doña Quixote.” In my blog, book, and videos, I tell tales about her: the good, the mad, and the fugly.
Blog Posts
Today Peter and I celebrate 50 years of marriage
and the three baroque years before, when we were “going steady”… Note: This post is a day late, because I forgot how to properly post a video on my website, something I had done many times before, and somehow tangled up the system to the point of freezing everything in place. Peter worked late into […]
Gerda on AlzAuthors podcast, interviewed by Marianne Sciuccio
AlzAuthors is a non-profit organization that promotes books written by people with dementia or their caretakers, including my own dementia memoir, Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia (Publisher: Hachette). Their website has introduced over 200 books about dementia and their authors. They also give links to blog posts by different writers about Alzheimer’s and other dementias. […]
A question I get from readers: “Gerda, how will you die when your quality of life becomes unacceptable?”
Featured art: Alessandro Sicioldr Bianchi. L’attesa o il Risveglio (Awaiting the Awakening), 2018 Every few months I receive letters from blog readers asking the question in the title: they want to know the specifics of how I, Gerda, intend to exit my life when it no longer meets the criteria of what is, for me, […]
Doña Quixote takes two socially distanced rainbows as a harbinger of better times
Featured photo: Peter Saunders from our 7th floor apartment. Given the downer characteristics of some of my recent posts, I decided to go rainbow this time: Peter took the photo shown above from our balcony a few days ago. As we stood looking together at the late-afternoon cityscape, my heart lifted skyward. Both of us […]
Isolation & Connection: a RadioWest film about how my family and I are coping (or not) with my dementia during the COVID isolation
Featured image: Screenshot from the RadioWest film Isolation and Connection. Videographer: Kelsie Moore. As many of you know, RadioWest has over the years made a series of short films on how my family and I are living with my dementia. (You can see them by selecting “Videos” from the menu at the top.) The most recent one, released […]
While searching out remedies for her Covid-19 blues, Doña Quixote gets the hang of hope
Featured art: Detail from Evening at the Window, Marc Chagall (1950). This past week I donned my Covid-19 mask and, with Peter as my ever-gracious chauffeur, set out for the Orthopedic Hospital at the University of Utah for treatment of the painful thumb joint on my right hand. At the hand clinic—contrary to my previous […]
While hazarding the hospital for a non-Covid emergency, Doña Quixote revisits her end-of-life decisions
Featured image: Ana Teresa Barboza: embroidery featuring bodily functions. There is no time like having emergency surgery during our worldwide reckoning with Covid-19 to revisit one’s notions of what the end of a life might look like. On the morning of Saturday August 8, I first became aware of intense, lingering stomach pains. By noon, […]