Eugenia Zukerman

I have been a volunteer guardian for many years and all of my wards have had dementia. One of them taught me not to be afraid of it. She was the happiest person I knew. I don’t know what world she lived in but she loved it. I learned to live in the moment and not compare who she was today with who she used to be.
It reminded me of an interview I did with an elderly woman who had an impaired memory. When doing survey research, all questions are asked in the same order. This woman was in a wheelchair in a nursing home. She was alert for some of the questions but not most of them. When I asked if she needed a wheelchair, she said, “No.” I broke protocol and skipped parts of the interview. When I got to the last question, I said to her, “Tell me about your marriage.” She replied: “I had a good marriage. But I gave in a lot more than he did.”
In 2017, at the age of 72 Eugenia Zukerman was a renowned flutist, writer, artistic director, correspondent on CBS Sunday Morning, educator, and author. She was married to a loving husband and had two daughters and two granddaughters. Life was wonderful. But then she began noticing signs of forgetfulness and confusion.
Reluctantly, she agreed to see a neurologist for neuropsychological evaluation and an MRI. She was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. While her mother was 103 years old and, until recently mentally alert, Eugenia had forgotten that all six of her mother’s siblings had died in their early 70s from that disease.
During the following year, she performed at Kennedy Center, faced her mother’s death, and closed her second home in New York City to live in her family home in upstate New York. With the help of a supportive family and her doctors, she decided to record her journey through this devastating disease. LIKE FALLING THROUGH A CLOUD, a poetic memoir is her story.
Written with insight and humor, Zukerman records her feelings and observations as she begins her journey through this treacherous time. For anyone experiencing this or similar diseases or knowing or caring for someone who is going through it, this book is a creative, invaluable resource. One of her biggest fears is that people she knows will abandon her. If we can stay in the moment, most of us can spend meaningful time with people with memory impairments.

This is the third poem in the book:

marbles

Maybe mine are lost
or maybe they’re rolling around
in my head looking for a place to land
Or maybe not
my daughters tell me to get tested
tested for what I ask
even though I know for what
but it’s for what I don’t want to know
So I let the marbles rolled around
in a swirl of distracting colors
because I don’t want to listen to them
the daughters
because if I hear them
I will
be
very
afraid
and this mother cannot be that mother
not ever
never

Definitely five stars!… (plus d'informations)