Archive - The Long Goodbye : Dementia Caregiving & Other Stories

Trying to Understand a Life I Can't Remember

I triangulate befores & afters from evidence of a life, but I'm more Yin/Yang than that.

Jun 17 •

The Things She Said When She Still Said Things

Ma had no filter, no internal editor way before dementia. If you were within earshot, you were a target...and if you were fat, well, you were a larger…

Jun 10 •

May 2025

I'm Not Mother Theresa

I'm a sober daughter, a work in progress trying to do the next right thing.

May 27 •

Finding The Secrets I Kept From Myself

Having blindly rewritten my own history to hide evidence of vulnerability, I don't know who I am. I'm an evidence-based archeological dig of dinosaur…

May 20 •

Surprise! A Mother's Day Post: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

An oldie, in honor of my never say die, Ma. Mother's Day, 2009.

May 10 •

Presenting a (not particularly) Scientific Argument on the Concept of Wandering Dementia™.

Not to be confused with dementia wandering, an annoyance of a different color entirely.

May 6 •

My Story Is All I Have To Offer

Me. Mom. Dementia. Drinky Drunky Sober Girl. Here I am, doing pretty much the only thing I’m qualified to do because I was a shite waitress.

May 1 •

April 2025

2025: Echo-location - Walking With Ghosts

I walk through that gossamer separation between now and then, time runs parallel rather than linear, to people and places like phantom limbs. Gone, but…

Published on THE DIRTYGIRL DIARIES - What I did for Love • Apr 29

A Double Life or a House of Mirrors?

Carving Narrative Out of Noise: The Mess, the Message, the Methods. I wasn’t living a double life; I was living lots of lives simultaneously…

Published on THE DIRTYGIRL DIARIES - What I did for Love • Apr 29

You Blinked & Everything Disappeared

Survival Means Piecing Together The Truth of a Life You Can't Recall. You can’t remember your life because you weren’t there. Life, your life, is…

Published on THE DIRTYGIRL DIARIES - What I did for Love • Apr 29

All of Me, Why Not Take All of Me?

Or at least help me figure out where some of me belongs. I've been feeling split, compartmentalized by having two disparate publications, both with a…

Apr 26 •

Five Little Piggies, Mom, God, Death & the Big Bang

She kept asking for a gun, so I got her one. Got one for myself too, while I was at it.

Apr 15 •

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