Featured image: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart),” 1983. Dementia makes you forget, but you don’t get to choose what you forget about your own part in racism. What you learned first, when you were a small child, usually lasts the longest. WHAT I WANT TO FORGET Watching out of the living room […]
Today, I picked up a cup in the living room to take to the dishwasher. In our kitchen, five steps away, I could not find the dishwasher. Or, rather, the concept of “dishwasher” did not come together in my head, even though I kept repeating “dishwasher, dishwasher” in my mind to remember what to do. […]
Featured art: Angel, stitched and burned on the synthetic fabric Tyvek by Gordana Brelih. Out of my 7 sisters-in-law (including exes and Esta who has died), Ria Saunders was my first—she and I married the Saunders brothers: she the oldest, Cliff, and I the younger, Peter. Our beloved Cliff died in June last year, 2019, […]
Featured image: From Entities of the Threshold, Tamae Frame, figurative ceramic sculptor. I started this post about two- to three weeks before the true danger of the corona virus became evident to (many, but not all) of us Americans. I was writing—again—about the shrinking of my world because of my dementia; grieving it again, as […]
Featured image: Australian Aboriginal artist Helen Milroy’s The Dance of Life (2006) reflects a multi-dimensional model of health and wellbeing from an Aboriginal perspective. All other art in this post is by Milroy. My beloved daughter-in-law Cheryl Saunders wrote the letter below to our family and friends in this time of coronavirus caution and, alas, panic. […]
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 […]