This week’s list features stories from Shara Johnson. Paul Fischer, John Woodrow Cox, Marc Hogan, and Angelica Jade Bastién.
dementia
They Were Labeled Witches. They Just Had Dementia.
“In tribal communities across Namibia, older, eccentric people are often accused of witchcraft and violently attacked.”
‘Raphael Couldn’t Have Painted Something More Beautiful’
The couple who saved an imprisoned artist’s life — and the extraordinary gift he gave in return.
Ungrown
“Here it is: Women are the gravity stopping humanity from drifting off aimlessly into the void. We mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts, grandmothers — women — are the backbone of the world.”
Alzheimer’s Before Forty
“Shawn says Jo asked him to promise he would never let him go into a nursing home, that he would help him find some way to end his life on his own terms.”
In Absentia
A meditation on the nature of grief, at a time when the whole world seems to be grieving.
On Vanishing
Dementia is a kind of erasure, a death before death, where the living discount the infirmed long before they’re gone.
What Shattered My Mother’s Mind
Winston Ross recalls the heartbreaking ordeal his family endured after his mother’s routine surgery led to post-operative delirium.
Hello, Forgetfulness; Hello, Mother
Peering into the mirror of her mother, Marcia Aldrich wonders whether she too is sentenced to dementia.
City on a Hill
A dementia patient’s daughter begins to question her own grasp on reality.