My five year old self sits on the toilet, door open so I can see the top flight of stairs inhabited by shadows from a skylight. There’s a closed door at the end of the twilight; escaping from the keyless lock is sunlight full of dust motes that float. I am torn between a monster […]
Tag: Dementia
Fifth of July
I remember your birthdays as always sunny, with an occasional shower, maybe, but I only ever picture you with golden shimmers. Your smiles started as honeyed glimmers reflected in your sky-blue eyes, rapt with homemade gifts, so badly wrapped. Once, we took you to a restaurant; inside was candlelit while summer blazed outside. Tipsy with […]
The Loss of Intimacy
She bustles in, weighed down with his clean underwear, pyjamas, barley water and boiled sweets, his reading glasses, now repaired, holding back wisps of her grey hair. She has to catch the bus at the same time every day and sit for hours, making repetitive small-talk with a man who doesn’t know her name, has forgotten, […]
Untethered
As she gradually lost her memory, she lost herself. Haunted by the loss, her anchor rope frayed, detached from sentence and paragraph of life’s prose. Weightless and joyless, she floated in free verse of demented poetry. Kim M. Russell, 2017 Image found on Pinterest My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar – Irony […]
Dementia Earthquake
In the past, we’d experienced active faults, grandparents, victims of old age assaults, unable to name the rumbles and shakes that came to be known as dementia earthquakes. And then there was you with your primary waves of forgetfulness, distance and those days when you disappeared behind your blue eyes, just stood and gazed with […]
Departure in Pigeon Steps
For five years I’ve watched my mother be consumed by dementia. At first, nothing seemed different about her: she was a little vague and avoided groups of people. Then she forgot how to make a cup of tea, how to eat, how to dress herself. She forgot my name, how to speak and walk. This […]
Some of my Mother is Missing
Lost slippers and kittens, Long ago days on a windy beach, The china owl you gave her, All are out of reach. The smile you remember is missing, A fading smear on her lips; The touch of the hand you are holding Is a mere brush of her fingertips. The photographs that you show her […]
Holding On
When I first started writing this 750-word short story, I didn’t think of it as a ghost story but as a story about dementia. However, there is a ghost, albeit a kind one and one I know well. In the half-dark of the small hours, she surfaces from fitful dreams – it could be less than an […]
Waiting for Sunday to come around
We are going to visit my mother on Sunday. She is in a home over a hundred miles from where we live and it is getting harder and harder to visit her as dementia is eating her memory away. She cannot remember my name but still recognises me; every time we visit I am greeted by […]
I saw something that made me very sad
I have been watching on Channel 4, a British television channel, a programme called Great Canal Journeys, with those wonderful actors Prunella Scales and Timothy West, who have been married a very long time. When not acting on stage or screen, they spent most of their free time on a barge on canals in England […]
writing in north norfolk 