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Dementia
Readers Write
Shaving
A teenage rite of passage, a prison barber, a husband’s unfamiliar face
July 2024
Poetry
My Mother’s Disease Introduces Me to My Mother
My mother’s disease wants / to know my name. // My mother’s disease takes / me in // with my mother’s eyes.
June 2024The Sun Interview
Home Sick
Emily Kenway on the Health-Care Crisis No One’s Talking About
Once we start to recognize that most of us will, at some point, have to step out of our professional role to provide care, then we have to transform how we’re running our economies. At the moment, our economies are relying on these hidden tragedies that befall women behind closed doors. All to keep the wheels of industry turning.
June 2024
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
A Letter From Sy’s Desk
In January my implausible idea of working at the magazine for fifty years will have come to pass, and I will comfortably step into a new role as editor emeritus. That having been said, it’s hard for me to say goodbye.
December 2023
The Sun Interview
Speak, Memory
Lynn Casteel Harper On New Ways Of Understanding Dementia
Askey: How do you think we will look back on our current treatment of people with dementia?
Harper: I think we will see how incomplete our approach was: The obsession with a cure. The overuse of psychotropic medications to “manage distressing behaviors.” Only something like 10 percent of that is necessary, research shows. A lot of those psychotropic medications are dangerous for people living with dementia.
December 2023
Poetry
Five Months After My First Husband’s Death
My son posts a picture of himself at three years old / with his father, my first husband, / who still has black curly hair and is looking right out of the photograph / at me, as if he knew this day would come, me staring back / at him and wondering where that moment has gone.
November 2022Fiction
Late Delivery
My mother didn’t raise a thief, but by the time you round forty, you’re pretty much raising yourself. I scooped the package from its hiding place, then waved my free hand at the doorbell camera.
June 2022
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Evanescence
Everything new disappears, within and without. Alzheimer’s disease is eroding her hippocampus. . . . She has what the neurologist calls “rapid forgetting,” so she lives in a state of evanescence; nothing holds.
April 2022
Poetry
My Father’s Messages Erased From My Answering Machine
“Hi, it’s just me.” This might be the only phrase I know for sure / was on the years of messages the phone company erased / when they — inexplicably — changed my number. / The messages are gone, but the grief is still there, / ripe, a fullness I’m glad I possess. We think we want grief / to pass, but what would I do if it were gone, / like the messages, irretrievable?
February 2022Fiction
The River Corrib
Lovely things, the railings. When it’s raining just right — half raining, the way it so often does here — the spiderwebs spun across the rails collect mist and shine, so that the Corrib looks like it’s swathed in sequined cloth.
January 2022
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