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Dementia
Fiction
Final Dispositions
People think that crazy is achieved when one day the gale-force wind makes a final, violent tear, and your little craft slips its mooring. Oh, no. It is achieved by you, who, one knot at a time, untie the tethers, whimsically at first, and then with some — or sometimes no known — purpose.
February 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Lost
Isabel is ninety-one and stands about four and a half feet tall. She has blue-gray eyes, a gray mustache, and four gray hairs below her lower lip. I often see her wandering the corridors of the dementia unit in the nursing home where I work as a chaplain.
November 2008
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Koans From My Mother
I was driving my mother from my sister Sue’s house to my own home last June when she said, “Sue has been my daughter her whole life. Why don’t I know her mother?”
July 2008
Photography
Into Silence
Over the course of two years I photographed my grandmother Marjorie Clarke on my weekly visits to her home in rural Butler, Maryland. With her health declining and Alzheimer’s disease loosening her ties to everyday reality, I spent much of my time reading aloud or singing songs to her, attempting to hold her attention as long as possible.
April 2007
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Mrs. Davises
One day my mother was at the hairdresser’s, sitting under the dryer with an array of tinfoil antennae in her hair and a magazine open in her lap, when she noticed that the woman under the next dryer was staring at her. The woman whispered tentatively, “Are you Mrs. Davis?”
March 2007
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Where The Water Is
One of the uncomfortable things about living with a person who suffers from Alzheimer’s is that it makes you confront your own character flaws.
June 2006
Readers Write
Grace
A cancer diagnosis, a positive pregnancy test, one last Sabbath dinner together
March 2005
Fiction
Dear Me
If you are reading this letter, then I have some bad news for you. You’ve always been a straight shooter, so here it is: You have Alzheimer’s.
December 2004
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Elopement
When I was fifteen, my father nailed my bedroom window shut to keep me from running off in the night. Almost forty years later, my sisters and I had to put him in a home with door alarms and special window locks to keep him in. Like me, he took off anyway.
October 2004
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