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
You ask, Gerda & 4 dementia buddies tell “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Living with Dementia”
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, in June, 2021, AlzAuthors hosted five of us who are currently living with dementia to a virtual discussion where we shared our stories. That is where I first had “live” communication with my dementia buddies Peter Berry, Jennifer Bute, and Wendy Mitchell from the UK and Michael […]
Failing toward the moon: as Doña Quixote tumbles toward the dark side, Gerda is gentled into a course correction
Featured image: Still from a 1902 French short film titled A Trip to the Moon ( Le Voyage dans la Lune) directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by sources, including Jules Verne’s “moon” novels the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from […]
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
Title quote: Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, a novel in which the protagonist descends into mental illness. Featured image: One of photographer Tony Luciani’s countless photos of his mother who had dementia. He had been a full-time, professional fine artist since post-graduate studies in Florence, Italy in 1978. He also later also took up […]
The vanished dongle and other more dire losses, or, Why Doña Quixote Abandoned All Hope for a Makeover
Featured image: Wire-mesh reconstruction of the Basilica Siponta—a 6th century christian structure—by Italian sculptor Edoardo Tresoldi. During my and Peter’s trip to Las Vegas during the first week in June, I decided one day to venture into territory different from my usual every-day-Fashion-Mall expeditions. I would instead cross the road to explore the Venetian hotel’s […]
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 […]