In 2021 my husband and life-partner was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The disease is a bewilderment (in its fullest sense) of the mind as well as a pathology of the brain, and so the person’s sense of reality and validity is often and without warning placed under threat. The shift from certainty and stability to a radical uncertainty and precariousness leaks into the mentality of the person’s care-partner and induces a certain kind of craziness. My encounter with Alzheimer’s disease has consequently brought me to a place full of dark thoughts and ideas, a daily swirl of impatience, desolation, nostalgia, compassion, revulsion, to name but a few. And yet I also have glimpses of where this brutal mix of reactions comes from: it is a complicated response to the world I find myself in – a world not only of personal distress but also of broken systems, disappointed political hopes and thwarted expectations. And, without doubt, there is a body of received ideas and unquestioned assumptions about the horrors of dementia that has crept into my ways of thinking and feeling.

Impelled as much by desperation as by curiosity, I keep trying to impart some meaning to what often feels like an overwhelming re-alignment of reality, trying to integrate the confusion and conundrums into my poetry and prose. By writing into the dark, as it were, I hope to find out what it is possible to think; how to think and feel and communicate beyond the boundaries of the apparently given.

So far, I have written two book chapters and a journal paper (all about to be published) on the connections between poetry and dementia:

SAUNDERS, L. (forthcoming). ‘Where is the Grief-Rage? Louise Glück and the Poetics of Absence’, Anglo-Saxónica, Thematic Issue on Ageing.

SAUNDERS, L. (forthcoming). ‘The Sacred Role? Poetry and the Ethics of Commemoration’. In: Pinheiro, J. and Zarebska, Z. (Eds) Representations of old age and ageing in literary and cultural narratives. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. Portugal.

SAUNDERS, L. (forthcoming). ‘Writing into the Dark: Dementia and the Cultivation of Human(e)ness’. In: Brown, C. and Handscomb, G. (Eds) Demagogues, Populism and Misinformation: A Guide to Combating Dark Ideas. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Ltd.

I have also been writing poems to try to capture some of the fierceness of emotion – this one appears in the Live Canon anthology:

Show

The trees have been talking. Not to us,

who are waiting here just out of sight

for the performance to begin – 

a play in the enigmatic late style

where what starts as comedy ends

as comedy; tragedy gathers in the middle. 

‘Do not be downhearted’, they cry

to each other; but we are not evergreen,

we have no defence against such winter:

the music stays unsounded, the stage unlit.

Like the restless crowd in a Mystery

we must believe or invent belief,

plead for the grace we have not deserved.

For what is about to unfold, make us ready.

With the time afforded by enforced leisure during the pandemic, I tried my hand at some creative non-fiction. Here’s an extract from an essay, ‘Creative Frailty: some thoughts on global catastrophe, the gift economy and the third age‘, which appeared in the online journal Axon in 2020:

… it is impossible to know what the long-term effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be, especially on the environment, as humans urgently re-build their societies and economies. Because there is evidence that the chain of virus transmission involved bats, pangolins and ‘wet markets’, there will no doubt be talk about the need to remake our relationship with animals; but whether and how far this will translate into large-scale action on behalf of the world’s fauna and flora is doubtful. What is clear is that the climate crisis and its associated harms are primarily a political catastrophe: anthropogenic climate change and other environmental damage have been known about, reported on and campaigned against for at least four decades. The current scale and pace of destruction and the despair it trails in its wake have been brought about because governments and big business have so far taken little or no action proportionate to the need. What to do? I have no answers beyond the obvious, that a sea-change is needed in our politics and economics as well as in our policies…