Sometimes when I function reasonably well for a few days, I ask myself if I might not just be faking dementia as I sometimes think people who don’t know we well suspect that I do. Sadly, though, this week three discouraging things happened that restored my integrity–”I really am not faking this”–but burst my bubble […]
As the micro-vessels in my brain keep clogging, my memory losses are getting worse and more bothersome. While I know that there is a material cause for some of my forgetting, I acknowledge that I also sometimes forget things because of a “character flaw,” similar to that of someone forgetting to buy flowers or chocolates for […]
At the start of winter, Doña Quixote moved in from the cold on the back stoep into the kitchen, where she is dangling from a hook in the ceiling. I shouldn’t have been such a push-over in letting her in. Give her a pinky… These last two weeks—since the start of the new year—the Doña has […]
As a “new” American of a mere 24 years, I admit that I will never “get” Thanksgiving in the same way that most American-born citizens do. For example, I have never cooked a turkey on “Turkey Day,” instead preparing South African staples from my childhood such as a leg of lamb and a meat- or […]
When Doug Fabrizio, curator of the VideoWest series about my dementia, interviewed me for the first film, he asked how dementia affected my state of being. “I feel like I am not well-balanced on the earth,” I replied. “I feel I could stumble. It’s like when you go to a Halloween haunted house and they […]
Yesterday afternoon I got a note from videographer Josh Weathers that the latest short film VideoWest is making of me is out. It’s called: Downhill from there. Peter and I watched it right away, and it was not very uplifting. I am still glad VideoWest made it, because it is very important to me to […]