As ideas for this post churned in my mind, I gathered some objects I have cherished as memorabilia throughout my life—we brought them along in the ships’ container when we emigrated—and took a photo of them: serving as the display surface is the riempies chair, (one of the eight around the table our family used […]
Title quote from “Blessing for the Longest Night,” Jan Richardson. Featured image by Peter, “2019 Saunders Family.” I write this in the season of …the winter solstice, the still point of the sun, its cusp and midnight, the year’s threshold and unlocking, where the past lets go of and becomes the future (Margaret Atwood, “Shape […]
…but, after many weeks, I’m attempting to at least write about it: I have been UNDIAGNOSED: I almost certainly don’t have microvascular disease, which—for the past 9 years—my doctors and I had thought to be the reason for my dementia symptoms. The shock of undiagnosis came last month, when the results of a recent MRI […]
Since Doña Quixote has had me locked up in dementia jail for many days during the past weeks, I did not have the wherewithal to do any writing. Fortunately, my granddaughter Aliya stood in for me by writing and illustrating this post. Aliya is 9, a great student, a voracious reader, a bodily-activity fanatic able […]
Featured photo: The RadioWest team, Elaine Clark, Kelsie Moore, Doug Fabrizio, Benjamin Bombard RadioWest and I go way back. In 2001, Doug Fabrizio interviewed me on his then brand-new “intelligent” show about my book of short stories that dealt with my family’s emigration from South Africa to Utah. Doug had thoroughly read my book (no, […]
Featured image: Cosmopolitan: skeleton makeup tutorial In August 2016, I signed the contract that granted Hachette Books the rights to publish Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia. It came out in June 2017. During the writing of my book, I created a character, Doña Quixote, to represent my demented alter ego. On her […]