Topics | Dementia | The Sun Magazine #5

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Dementia

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.

By Marshall Clarke 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?”

By Susan 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.

By Jan Shoemaker June 2006
Readers Write

Grace

A cancer diagnosis, a positive pregnancy test, one last Sabbath dinner together

By Our Readers 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.

By Brian Buckbee 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.

By Rebecca T. Godwin October 2004
Fiction

Hospital Attack Wounds 3

Hearing herself, she waves her hand. “It’s not. . . . It’s trucky.” The words leaving her mouth flutter around her like small, confused birds that keep bumping into each other in midflight.

By Greg Ames August 2002
Fiction

Blue Flamingo Looks At Red Water

That bus is going to slam into my daughter. In my stop-action memory, everything lies bare a grace note before the accident. The school bus grinds forward stupidly, a yellow hippo. Henry is at the crosswalk, waiting for me as I turn the corner. He is not holding Mary’s hand.

By Katherine Vaz May 2002
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Good Enough Daughter

I was hopeful as I drove my parents’ snow-covered car from their house in Shaker Heights to the Judson Park Retirement Community, where they now resided, at the edge of downtown Cleveland. After several months, Judson still seemed satisfactory to me.

By Alix Kates Shulman September 1999