Alzheimer’s/dementia end-of-life plans

October 11, 2021

Fancying herself open-minded, Doña Quixote speaks at an alternative medicine conference

Three months ago, I received an e-mail invitation from craniosacral and longevity expert Michael Morgan to participate in an upcoming (October 20-24) online gathering, the Alzheimer’s World Summit. Michael would be the host. The purpose of the Summit was to bring together others like himself who had started to apply healing therapies that were developed outside of mainstream/conventional Western medicine toward […]

August 30, 2020

While hazarding the hospital for a non-Covid emergency, Doña Quixote revisits her end-of-life decisions

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, I had to cut short an outdoor […]

July 21, 2019

A RadioWest “Staff Pick”: short film series about Gerda and her family’s life with dementia

Featured photo: The RadioWest team, Elaine Clark, Kelsie Moore, Doug Fabrizio, Benjamin Bombard Click here to see the so-far complete RadioWest films about my dementia. 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 […]

November 30, 2017

A new RadioWest film: this one is about Peter, my carer, my fixer, my lover, my friend

My dearest Peter, Last year for my birthday, you wrote me a letter that includes this quote from The Velveteen Rabbit: “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who […]

August 10, 2017

The people Doña Quixote introduces me to: Gillian and Jonathan Bennet, the remarkable couple to whom this post is dedicated

Main image: Gillian Bennett and her cat Cosmo (photo courtesy of Jonathan Bennett). A totally unexpected pleasure from my blog is people writing to me out of the blue. One such e-mail did give me pleasure, but of a kind I have to qualify: the pleasure lay in the fact that I immediately recognized Jonathan […]

January 19, 2017

Eric Shulzke interviews me about dementia and assisted death in a Deseret News article about the status of Utah’s end-of-life choices law

Photo credit: All photos in this post are by Scott Winterton, Deseret News. In earlier posts and in VideoWest’s 2nd video of me and my family and how we are dealing with my growing dementia, I have lamented the fact that someone in the late stages of dementia cannot ever qualify to receive an assisted […]

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