Gerda Saunders

Born in South Africa in 1949, Gerda Saunders immigrated to the United States in her mid-thirties. In 2010, a few days before her sixty-first birthday, she was diagnosed with cerebral microvascular disease. Saunders retired from her position as associate director of the gender studies program at the University of Utah and spent the next five years keeping a journal of her experiences. “Dementia does not hold still,” she wrote, after the completion of this book. “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.”