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 […]
Main Photo: Rick Rayburn takes care of his wife Marianne, who has dementia. As impossible as it seems to me that our generation, the baby boomers, are now the old people, I see it confirmed in myself and in my circle of friends and family, where hip- and other joint replacements, serious illnesses, dementia for […]
When Peter and I were in the middle of our careers, each of us took business trips on our own, except for once or twice that I was able to cash in on one of his trips in order to do my own thing while he was communing with clients and colleagues. We really had […]
Doña Quixote is the only one in our household who is not surprised by the steady progression of my book from a flabby manuscript to a limber stack of proof pages. Some weeks ago my page-stack even acquired a cover. Most astonishing, however, is that MEMORY’S LAST BREATH: FIELD NOTES ON MY DEMENTIA is already being […]
Michael Kelly is in his early 70s. He lives with a varying number of cats in a small apartment in Kaizer, Oregon, a small town of about 37,000 people. He has Alzheimer’s. While he has not been formally diagnosed, he has “watched the disease’s progression in [his] mother for 11 years. When you suddenly encounter […]