Over the 7 years of retirement since my dementia diagnosis, I have gradually realized that direct activism has become a thing of the past for me. Every now and then I get so mad, though, that I have to participate, for example, in the rally protesting the LDS church making apostates of the children of […]
The idea of the Ouroboros, or tail-eating serpent, first lodged in my mind during an organic chemistry class when I was 18 and in my second year at the University of Pretoria. By then I had already met Peter and we had moved from being “just friends” to “going steady.” We were in class together […]
I have been lucky enough to accumulate four strings of pearls in my lifetime. Last week, I lost them all. Above, wearing my first pearls on my 28th birthday in 1977, when Marissa was 6 months old. Peter gave me bunches of flowers, wrapped in newspaper those days. My first pearls were from Japan, which […]
When my opthalmologist told me that I would benefit from eyelid surgery because my droopy eyelids were obscuring a large portion of my upper visual field, one of the first things that came to mind was gratitude that there was such a thing as Medicare and that they would pay–“they” being the two different government […]
I want to point out that posting this totally unvarnished photo of myself shows that vanity is not an insurmountable obstacle in my life. What I intend with this post, is to let you know that I am going to have “cosmetic” eye-lid surgery tomorrow–the kind of “cosmetic” that Medicare, aka, you, the taxpayer!–will pay […]
For those of us lucky enough to encounter a soulmate at all, such a person usually comes but once in a lifetime. For Edith Buchsteiner Schmidt, true love came twice: first, when she was 16 and met her husband-to-be, Helmut Schmidt, at a youth camp in Germany; second, nine years after Helmut’s death, when she […]
That is, if one can consider two women over twenty years younger than me as peers! The Wombat I have had some ups and downs with my energy level the last few weeks—a kind of mental exhaustion unrelated to actually having done any thinking or writing. When lovely Shauna Robertson of chicover50 invited me along […]
Today, Sunday Oct 8, marks 1 week since the shooter from Mesquite killed 58 and wounded 489 people in Las Vegas. A week before that dreadful day, Peter and I had booked our free hotel rooms on the strip. On Monday, after our kids and friends individually called or e-mailed to ask if we were […]
Every now and then I get questions about dementia from readers of my book or blog. Since I am not an expert in neuroscience or any other medical field related to the brain, I usually steer away from medical-style answers and instead ask if my commenter if they’re worried about dementia in themselves or their […]
Some of my friends tell me I’m famous for having written Memory’s Last Breath. Well, I like to think that I am. But not quite in the way those friends might imagine. While I am ecstatically grateful for the great reception that my book has received upon publication, in the enormous world of US publishing a […]