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WORK TITLE: Memorys Last breatBreat’s Last h
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1949
WEBSITE: https://www.gerdasaunders.com
CITY:
STATE: UT
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.gerdasaunders.com/about/ * http://www.npr.org/2017/06/17/533239904/in-memorys-last-breath-an-academic-confronts-dementia * http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=5403270&itype=CMSID
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1949, in South Africa; married Peter Saunders, in 1971; children: Marissa and Newton.
EDUCATION:University of Utah, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Utah, associate director of gender studies, retired in 2011.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Born in South Africa in 1949, Gerda Saunders wrote a memoir of her life dealing with dementia in Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia, published in 2017. She was diagnosed with early-onset cerebral microvascular disease in 2011, when she was sixty-one. A prolific journal writer, she decided to record “field notes” to document how the disease was affecting her brain, memories, and destruction of her identity. She compliments the support she receives from her husband, Peter, to whom she has been married since 1971. They met as students at the University of Pretoria. Saunders says the degenerative brain disease continues every day leaving her with less ability to reason out her definition of “self” until there will be a time that she won’t know who she is.
Saunders was raised on an Afrikaner farm in South Africa and immigrated to the United States in 1984 with her husband and their two young children. She earned a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Utah in the 1990s. She stayed at the university, working in various faculty positions. In 2011, she retired as the associate director of the school’s Gender Studies Program. She has also published a collection of her fiction.
In an interview with Ellen Fagg Weist online at the Salt Lake Tribune, Saunders explained how she handled the news of her disease: “Each person, I believe, has their own way of working through grief and doubt and, especially, difficulties with their identity. For me, that place has always been writing. . . . Who can I be when this intellect that I built a lot of my identity on is taken away?” In Memory’s Last Breath, Saunders explores the range of her identities by offering biographical information of her life in South Africa and America and her devotion to her husband. She also started a blog of her emotional journey. In an interview online at NPR with Melissa Block, Saunders explained why she wanted to write about her dementia: “My whole life path was determined by the fact that I had a good brain to start with. . . . And now this big brain is being eaten away. So what am I now? What will I be? What is my identity, and what does it mean to live with an identity that’s eroding all the time? I felt a strong feeling to understand this disease.”
In the book, she describes situations in which loss of short-term memory has led to shoplifting when she forgot to pay, losing her bearings while driving, and forgetting what she had just said to friends and colleagues. Remaining a fiercely intellectual person, she describes how the disease is betraying her both emotionally and scientifically. In addition to exploring the nature of memory and the field of neuroscience, Saunders uses “her personal experience, presented in a work of breathtaking defiance,” to describe how dementia steals one’s self, according to Bridget Thoreson in Booklist. A writer in Kirkus Reviews noted: “The author’s candor is especially evident in the way she addresses the way her dementia has and will continue to dehumanize her the longer she lives with it.”
Writing in the New York Times, Jennifer Senior sums up the poignancy of Saunders’s revelation about her disease: “Saunders’s awareness of her own mortality has turned her into an omniscient eye. She imagines the whole fate of the universe as it unspools—the sun becoming a black dwarf, the Andromeda Galaxy merging with the Milky Way. How she’ll miss it. ‘I do not want,’ she writes, ‘to go away.’” Vicky Hallett declared in Washington Post: “The book closes with Saunders addressing the realities to come, including what she refers to as ‘my eventual suicide.’ She surveys the right-to-die landscape, which is particularly treacherous in America.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2017, Bridget Thoreson, review of Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia, p. 2.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2017, review of Memory’s Last Breath.
New York Times, June 23, 2017, Jennifer Senior, review of Memory’s Last Breath.
Washington Post, June 16, 2017, Vicky Hallett, review of Memory’s Last Breath.
ONLINE
Gerda Saunders Website, https://www.gerdasaunders.com/ (December 1, 2017), author profile.
NPR Website, http://www.npr.org/ (June 17, 2017), Melissa Block, author interview.
Salt Lake Tribune Online, http://archive.sltrib.com/ (June 19, 2017), Ellen Fagg Weist, “Meet the Utah Writer Whose Field Notes on Dementia Became an Act of Self-preservation.”
Meet the Utah writer whose field notes on dementia became an act of self-preservation
Books • Gerda Saunders makes conscious her clear-eyed journey into dementia.
7
Courtesy photo
Utah writer Gerda Saunders.
Courtesy photo
Book cover of "Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia."
Courtesy photo
Utah writer Gerda Saunders.
Courtesy photo
Book cover of "Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia."
Courtesy photo
Utah writer Gerda Saunders.
Courtesy photo
Book cover of "Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on my Dementia."
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By Ellen Fagg Weist The Salt Lake Tribune
·
June 19, 2017 12:32 pm
This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In her memoir, "Memory's Last Breath," Gerda Saunders reports on her life's most extraordinary journey: her clear-eyed steps into dementia.
The book (with its astonishing subtitle: "Field Notes on My Dementia") is a literary achievement in the way it blends meditations on memory and identity with brain science, rooted by the writer's anthropologic jottings of daily misadventures from her befuddled brain.
Saunders will launch the memoir with two Salt Lake City events, a reading at The King's English Bookshop on Thursday and another at Art Access on June 29. (See box for details.)
In 2010, just days before her 61st birthday, Saunders was diagnosed with early-onset dementia, specifically microvascular disease. "I was — as my rather blunt neurologist put it — already 'dementing,' " she writes in the book's opening chapter, "Telling Who I Am Before I Forget." "I was unaware the word had a verb form: I dement, you dement, he/she/it dements, they dement, we all dement."
"Each person, I believe, has their own way of working through grief and doubt and, especially, difficulties with their identity. For me, that place has always been writing," says Saunders, who published a collection of fiction while earning a Ph.D. in English literature at the University of Utah in the 1990s. She retired in 2011 as the associate director of the U.'s Gender Studies Program.
After her diagnosis, she began writing field notes as an act of self-preservation. "Who can I be when this intellect that I built a lot of my identity on is taken away? What can be left?"
One of the writer's aims for "Memory's Last Breath" is to marry her "dementing" self with memories of her former selves. The book also includes an arc of biography, celebrating the life she built with her husband, Peter, the love of her life. In 1984, the South African natives transplanted themselves and their two children to become Utah immigrants, and eventually, U.S. citizens.
She even crafted a character for her episodes of befuddlement, Doña Quixote, a madwoman on a quest for truth. (Through the magic of Photoshop, her husband has made the character appear in a photograph on her blog.)
The memoir has sparked notice in early reviews for its singularity (Andrew Solomon), "evocative writing" (Publishers Weekly) and its "richly textured" narrative and unsparing voice (Kirkus).
Some Utah readers have been following the story through Saunders' blog and a beautiful series of videos produced by KUER's VideoWest. In considering her illness in such an unsparing way, it is as if the Utah writer is donating her consciousness to literary science.
As her short-term memory has slipped away, the writer resorts to re-reading her book before publicity interviews. "I cannot manage the switch between my head and the practical world anymore," she says.
Her ability to maintain habitual behaviors is gone. "I start with one step of this, and I never get to the second step," she says. "What I see myself doing seems to be how people with attention deficit disorder have described it to me."
Talking about dementia, in all of its forms, may be her last act of advocacy, a writerly last stand. It's a chance to "show people there is life after diagnosis, and demonstrating we can go on and have joy," Saunders says. "Talking about this, in a way, is a huge relief."
ellenf@sltrib.com
facebook.com/ellen.weist —
'Field Notes on My Dementia'
P Gerda Saunders reads from "Memory's Last Breath."
When • Thursday, 7 p.m.
Where • The King's English Bookshop, 1511 S. 1500 East, Salt Lake City
When • Thursday, June 29, 6:30 p.m.
Where • Art Access, 230 S. 500 West, #125, Salt Lake City
More • gerdasaunders.com
Videos • KUER's VideoWest has produced an extraordinary series of short documentaries about Saunders' journey; view them at videowest.kuer.org/gerda
In 'Memory's Last Breath' An Academic Confronts Dementia
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Memory's Last Breath
Memory's Last Breath
Field Notes on My Dementia
by Gerda Saunders
Hardcover, 272 pages purchase
She kept getting confused, losing her place in lessons at the University of Utah, where she taught. And then, just before she turned 61, Gerda Saunders was given a diagnosis: She has early-onset microvascular dementia.
Saunders and her husband Peter are South African; they emigrated to the States back in the 1980s.
Now, at age 67, Gerda Saunders has written a memoir, Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia. And she remembers vividly what her "rather blunt" neurologist said when she gave Saunders the news. "She said, it looks like you may already have been dementing. And because I'm involved with words, I have always been, it just struck me in that moment, really, as funny in a way that there's this verb that I never thought could be derived from the noun dementia. Suddenly it felt that this was something I ..." Saunders grasps for the word she wants. "When you are sort of, almost like guilty of participating in an act, in the way that we speak about it in colonialism, that you are — complicit is the word I'm thinking of. That I'm complicit in something that my body and my head is doing something, in a verb form, which means I'm actively engaged in doing this."
Interview Highlights
On what it's meant to write about her dementia
Certainly, my whole life path was determined by the fact that I had a good brain to start with. ... And now this big brain is being eaten away. So what am I now? What will I be?
Gerda Saunders
Certainly, my whole life path was determined by the fact that I had a good brain to start with. I was very fortunate. And now this big brain is being eaten away. So what am I now? What will I be? What is my identity, and what does it mean to live with an identity that's eroding all the time? I felt a strong feeling to understand this disease before a time when I couldn't understand anything anymore.
On how her diagnosis has altered her marriage
It has a constant and daily effect on our relationship. And I am more convinced than I've ever been in my life that Peter loves me until the day I die. Because he's so tender and loving, and just always there for me. And it's hard for me to know that I'm not fully reciprocating. You know, my mind drifts. I'm not good at doing my share of the household, I'm getting worse at it every day. His responsibility is mounting. But we do talk about it, and I feel that our relationship is deeper than it's ever been.
On not sounding impaired
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Diagnosing And Living With Early Onset Dementia
If you are in a conversation with me like this, where there are no distractions, I can hold together a framework of concepts, and speak within that framework. Where you see, really, some kind of craziness is when I interface with the world. I have severe attention deficit disorder. So I see something in front of me, and that is the thing I interact with. You know, when Peter and I have to go somewhere, we have an appointment, and I have to get ready — and I get sidetracked ten times in minutes, you know, where I go to fetch something, or I go to comb my hair. It's a very exhausting way to get through a physical day. And it's incredibly exhausting for Peter, too, because he is really thinking for two people.
On talking to her family about the end of her life
We worked out a plan for me and my family whereby I would go somewhere where I could find a legal assisted death. At the moment, it does not look as though that would be possible for me in the United States, so that means we would have to go to another country. And so we have tried to financially provide for that possibility, and also emotionally prepare for that possibility with my family ... And I asked this gift of them, to do this for me. It is such a comfort to me, to know that my family love me enough to want to give me this gift.
ABOUT GERDA
Peter and Gerda at Fashion Place Mall, Salt Lake City. 2016.
Peter and Gerda at Fashion Place Mall, Salt Lake City. 2016.
When I turned 61 in 2011, I was diagnosed with cerebral microvascular disease, a precursor of dementia. I retired from my job as the associate director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah. Since I have always processed my life stages by writing about them, I started keeping a journal about the effect of my brain’s unraveling on my identity. Five years later, I completed a book-length memoir, MEMORY’S LAST BREATH: FIELD NOTES ON MY DEMENTIA, which is forthcoming from Hachette Books in June 2017. But dementia does not hold still. Like anyone with a degenerative brain disease, I continue to dement every day, never done until I die. Every time my brain suffers an additional insult, I have less brain power to puzzle out my remaining “self.” There will come a time when I don’t care or don’t know who I am. Until then, though, I hope to maintain this website with the help of my saintly and tech-savvy husband, Peter.
THE STORY OF THE HOME PAGE PHOTO
My husband Peter and I met each other in a Physics class at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, in 1967. I was 17 and he 19. We started “going steady,” as we said in those days, about a year later. The photo above shows us at a university dance—called a bokjol in Afrikaans—on Friday, March 28, 1969. I can give the exact date because of our fancy dress costumes: we are wearing pajamas under a white sheet that enfolds both of us, a costume intended to evoke John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s weeklong “performance ‘peace’” honeymoon that started three days earlier.
That was then. Here we are now, 47 years later, during one of our whenever-we-can-get-away “honeymoons,” this time in Las Vegas.
About Gerda
You can learn more about me and my dementia by following a series of short films that VideoWest is making of me and my family.
About Gerda
I was born in South Africa in 1949, the year apartheid became official. Peter and I met as university students and married in 1971. In 1984, when we were in our mid-thirties, we emigrated from South Africa to the US with our young children, Marissa (7) and Newton (4). Today our children are in their mid-thirties. Marissa is married to Adam and they have a little boy, Dante (3). Newton is married to Cheryl and they have a son, Kanye (9), and a daughter, Aliya (6).
As new immigrants, we could seldom afford to go to South Africa as a family. Once we were somewhat established, we did manage a few family trips. Since we had our first grandchild, I had a yearning for us all to visit South Africa together once more. When I was diagnosed with dementia, my wish became more urgent. For Christmas 2014, my brothers and sisters in South Africa helped us buy tickets so that all 9 of us could make that journey. In my blog, you will get to know more about my family and how they support me and each other as we grapple together with my fly-away self. For starters, here is a video of us, the Salt Lake City Saunderses, thanking our generous South African siblings for the plane tickets.
Remembering Life
Jennifer Senior
The New York Times. (June 23, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC13(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Just days before her 61st birthday, Gerda Saunders made a wretched discovery at the neurologist's office: ''Dement'' is a verb. ''I dement, you dement, he/she/it dements,'' Saunders writes in ''Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia.'' It's an unlovely conjugation if ever there was one. Why is it that disorders of the body so often involve disfigurements of language as well?
Even before that day, Saunders knew her memory was deserting her. In conversation with colleagues, she'd lose her bearings midsentence. (Before retiring, she was the associate director of the gender studies program at the University of Utah.) She'd misplace the names of books and authors she knew by heart. Once, at an important meeting, she asked all of the participants to go around the table and introduce themselves. They'd already done so.
So she went to the doctor, described her symptoms, wedged herself inside an M.R.I. machine. Her scans revealed ''white matter lesions,'' or stoppered microvessels that were compromising the flow of blood in her brain. A neurologist told her she'd need two more evaluations at two-year intervals before she could be given a definitive diagnosis of dementia.
''But in my heart,'' Saunders writes, ''I already knew: I am dementing. I am dementing. I am dementing.''
She learned she had microvascular disease. Apart from Alzheimer's, it's the greediest thief of memory there is. It turns out that there's more than one way to dement.
Saunders's memoir is an attempt to declare herself before her mind wastes away -- and to analyze her dementia as dispassionately as possible, in the cool manner that a herpetologist might a snake. The first two chapters are melodious. The last chapter is stunning in both senses of the word, gorgeous and shocking. The chapters in the middle, while always engagingly philosophical, sometimes get bogged down in the past, and while I enjoyed some of the stories Saunders tells about her unusual upbringing -- she was raised on a farm in South Africa during apartheid -- I kept scanning the shoreline for barges bringing news of her present condition.
Then again, I can see why she might have felt compelled to tell her story in full. If this book is her final stand, wouldn't she want to get her imperfectly remembered self, in all its pixelated fuzziness, enshrined on the page? If only for the brief reprieve it gives her from her current woes? ''The more the world around me confuses me,'' she writes, ''the better it feels to escape.''
''Memory's Last Breath'' began as an article in the Winter 2013 issue of The Georgia Review, later republished in Slate. (For more than a year, Slate has also been running an extremely moving video series about Saunders's decline.) Writing a whole book nearly took the stuffing out of her. ''I sometimes got so lost in the manuscript that I almost gave up,'' she writes in an author's note.
Saunders's dementia has most significantly corrupted her ''working memory,'' meaning she has trouble hanging onto and processing bits of information in the short term. She forgets that broccoli is boiling on the stove, and wanders outside to water plants; she washes her hair twice in an hour.
Her frontal lobe, responsible for planning and reasoning and making judgment calls -- all the things we associate with rational, dignified adult functioning -- is marbled with lesions. It's an internal blueprint for humiliation. She urinates on closed toilet lids, tries on clothes in the middle of a department store. Objects confuse her. At a restaurant, she stares at an upside-down beer stein and cannot make head or tail of it -- literally. She mistakes the bottom of the glass for a lid and tries to pry it off.
So what do you do when you slowly become estranged from yourself? When your thoughts start to dissolve into a slurry of gibberish? Particularly if you've staked so much of your identity -- and so much of your pleasure -- on a rigorous life of the mind?
Saunders's condition is increasingly precarious, but for the moment she remains a graceful, innovative writer -- getting her thoughts on the page helps her keep track of them -- and she is still capable of making connections with the ease of a switchboard operator, her blighted neurocircuitry notwithstanding: like the one between her childhood habit of dissociating and her current mini-sabbaticals from reality. (Or what Iris Murdoch, in the midst of her own descent, unwittingly and eerily called ''going away.'') Or the one between certain features of her mental unraveling and Don Quixote's madness. Or between Damien Hirst's shark pickled in formaldehyde and the liminal, suspended state that awaits all sufferers of dementia.
''I took Hirst's shark very personally,'' she writes. ''Not only something, but also someone could be there and not there at the same time. And that someone: me.''
Saunders, now 67, has given a good deal of thought to the day that she'll be here and not be here. She's both adaptable and spirited enough to know there's more to a good life than intellectual pursuits alone. The question, as she puts it, is when she will ''cross from being alive to the living death of madness -- this is, when people will rightly say 'Gerda is no longer Gerda.'''
What she goes on to describe is, if you think about it, a perverse variation of Theseus' paradox. What if you started replacing the solid planks of his ship with rotted ones? Is it still the same ship after one plank is replaced? How about half of them? Is there a point when Gerda is no longer Gerda?
She asks family and friends to consider these questions, among others, as her mind deteriorates:
Has dread replaced happy anticipation?
Does she fear loved ones more than she finds comfort in them?
Is she insatiable in her needs? Are her caretakers faltering on the precipice of nervous exhaustion?
Health care professionals and policy makers, who tend to view the mind and the body as two distinct entities, could do worse than to read her list of questions in full. It's an intrepid inventory she takes. And if enough answers to these questions are ''yes,'' she has an intrepid response, which I'll leave to readers to discover.
For now, Saunders's awareness of her own mortality has turned her into an omniscient eye. She imagines the whole fate of the universe as it unspools -- the sun becoming a black dwarf, the Andromeda Galaxy merging with the Milky Way. How she'll miss it. ''I do not want,'' she writes, ''to go away.''
Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My DementiaBy Gerda Saunders272 pages. Hachette. $27.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY ALESSANDRA MONTALTO/ THE NEW YORK TIMES) (C13); The author Gerda Saunders, whose book began as an article in The Georgia Review. (PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SAUNDERS) (C19)
When dementia came on at age 61, she began writing about it
Vicky Hallett
Washingtonpost.com. (June 16, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
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Byline: Vicky Hallett
Gerda Saunders is "dementing." That's what her neurologist told her in 2010 just before her 61st birthday, confirming what Saunders had already suspected: Her recent mental missteps were a sign of something serious.
They were also something that Saunders wanted to chronicle, which she soon found herself with time to do after retiring as associate director of gender studies at the University of Utah. (The final straw was when she was chairing a meeting, and in a moment of confusion recommended that everyone introduce themselves -- for the second time.)
Her journal has morphed into a memoir, "Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia," that explores her life and her brain.
Even before her diagnosis, Saunders had a remarkable story to tell. It starts in South Africa, where she was raised on her Afrikaner family farm, a place without electricity but with black laborers that her father had "inherited." That she can mine recollections from this childhood in vivid detail is as surprising to her as it may be to her readers. She also marvels at her ability to write a book -- an undoubtedly complex mental task -- when her daily life is filled with instances of unintentional shoplifting and being baffled by how to use a glass that is upside down.
"I am not the only person who appears to be 'faking,'" Saunders writes, sharing the results of her scientific inquiry into her condition. She weaves in neurological research, accounts of other individuals with dementia, and plenty of talk of dendrites and the cerebral cortex.
All the while, she continues to sketch out her path, from the farm to boarding school to -post-university married life with two children. When her husband was offered a job in the United States in 1984, they all left South Africa -- and the resulting culture clash often left her discombobulated. It's a sensation that returned after the dementia diagnosis, Saunders writes.
The book closes with Saunders addressing the realities to come, including what she refers to as "my eventual suicide." She surveys the right-to-die landscape, which is particularly treacherous in America for a person who expects not to be "of sound mind" someday. But she has traveled across oceans before, and she's willing to do it again, she writes, "when people will rightly say, 'Gerda is no longer Gerda.'"
Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My
Dementia
Bridget Thoreson
Booklist.
113.18 (May 15, 2017): p2.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia. By Gerda Saunders. June 2017. 288p. Hachette, $27
(9780316502627); e-book, $13.99 (9780316502634). 362.1968.
Faced with unspeakable loss, some may act out or give up. Saunders chose to write. After she was diagnosed at 60 with
dementia, she left her career in academia and embarked on writing about her experience in a last stand of the mind.
Those writings evolved into this deeply emotional and humbling memoir. From her childhood in South Africa through
her family's move to the U.S. and her mother's own struggles with dementia, Saunders recounts a rich, full life before
her illness began stealing her memory. In poignant journal entries, she captures the intrusion of dementia into everyday
life-getting lost, enduring dangerous mishaps in the kitchen, losing the thread of a conversation while speaking, and
having trouble getting dressed. The impact of these losses on Saunders, an academic prone to liberally using literary
quotations and classical references, is palpable. While she explores the fragile nature of memory and researches
neuroscience, it is her personal experience, presented in a work of breathtaking defiance, that marks how dementia
steals one's self. -Bridget Thoreson
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Thoreson, Bridget. "Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia." Booklist, 15 May 2017, p. 2. General
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Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
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Saunders, Gerda: MEMORY'S LAST BREATH
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Saunders, Gerda MEMORY'S LAST BREATH Hachette (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 6, 13 ISBN: 978-0-316-50262-7
A former gender studies professor's memoir about living and remembering her life in the face of dementia.Before 2010,
when doctors told her that she had microvascular disease, one of the leading causes of dementia, Saunders had it all: a
successful career and a thriving, multigenerational family. She retired from the University of Utah two years later with
"no whimpering, no whining, no despair," fully aware that hers had been a fortunate existence. Hoping to offer
something that "could be actually useful in the world," Saunders began keeping a journal about her "lurch into that
'strange Country' " of memory loss. She started by recalling everything she could about an early life that had begun in
the rural Transvaal region of South Africa. By "flesh[ing] out [her] shrinking self with former selves," the author would
become "Dona Quijote," the madwoman questing for truth. Drawing on literature, scientific research, her family's
collective memory, and her own experiences, Saunders crafts an eloquent, often lyrical book that, in its fragmentation,
becomes increasingly affecting over the course of the narrative. As she speaks about growing older and wearing clothes
that express "the way I feel rather than look," for example, she intersperses her reflections with "Dementia Field Notes"
journal entries that bluntly address all the difficulties she must face on a daily basis due to her condition. The author's
candor is especially evident in the way she addresses the way her dementia has and will continue to dehumanize her the
longer she lives with it. Not wishing to be relegated into a zombielike "neither-dead-nor-alive" status, Saunders
discusses the plans she and her family have made to help her die with dignity when her quality of life has dwindled too
far. The book is remarkable not only for its fiercely honest, sometimes-poetic portrayal of mental decline, but also for
the way the author effectively celebrates "the magisterial of a mind, the grant of an interval to sound the ordinances of a
world without being." A courageous, richly textured, and unsparing memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Saunders, Gerda: MEMORY'S LAST BREATH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA489268386&it=r&asid=5c143e884ab1324840d58269f8fae7a0.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A489268386
10/22/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My
Dementia
Publishers Weekly.
264.13 (Mar. 27, 2017): p91.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Memory's Last Breath:
Field Notes on My Dementia
Gerda Saunders. Hachette, $27 (288p)
ISBN 978-0-316-50262-7
Saunders (Blessings on the Sheep Dog) writes bravely about her early-onset dementia diagnosis, and nicely bridges the
intensely personal experience of her failing mind with examinations of neurological science. Saunders, who emigrated
to the U.S. from South Africa in 1984,includes "Dementia Field Notes" sidebars throughout the book that record everworsening
daily struggles. These stand in contrast with the main text, in which she explores the essence of self, identity,
and memories. Her evocative writing shows her to be a researcher and craftswoman, and to the reader her faculties
seem undiminished. Saunders reflects on more than 60 years as a life-affirming dividual, an anthropology term that
acknowledges that deep connections come from communal bonds continually established throughout a lifetime. She
writes about her loving family life in her formative years as a white South African during apartheid, the cross-cultural
experience of a new life in the U.S., and the challenges of parenting and academic life. Saunders draws on all of these
experiences to guide readers through a primer on neuroscience, the unreliability of memory, and even the place of
humans in the cosmos. Her discussion of whether and when to pursue assisted suicide is smart and does not diminish
the hopeful voice of a self-described "Dofia Quixote" as she fights her mental descent with dignity. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia." Publishers Weekly, 27 Mar. 2017, p. 91. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA487928170&it=r&asid=c25aaba28cbc1b4dfdf4702bcad26aba.
Accessed 22 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A487928170