Featured art: Alessandro Sicioldr Bianchi. L’attesa o il Risveglio (Awaiting the Awakening), 2018 Every few months I receive letters from blog readers asking the question in the title: they want to know the specifics of how I, Gerda, intend to exit my life when it no longer meets the criteria of what is, for me, […]
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 […]
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 […]
I met Nancy Solari some time ago when she pre-recorded an interview about my dementia for her radio show. This week the show is being broadcast as If You Are Uncertain of the Future, by Turning to Others for Support You Will Be Able to Live Full Out. Nancy Solari has first-hand experience of living […]
…but, after many weeks, I’m attempting to at least write about it: I have been UNDIAGNOSED: I almost certainly don’t have microvascular disease, which—for the past 9 years—my doctors and I had thought to be the reason for my dementia symptoms. The shock of undiagnosis came last month, when the results of a recent MRI […]
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 […]