A few years after we lost my nonna, Franco was diagnosed with dementia. These first few years were the hardest. A social man and a great orator, he slowly withdrew into himself. Yet, over time, parts of Nonno’s personality began to bear fruit again.
Browsing: Perspective
Through stuttered sobs, I thanked him for being a good grandad. He snorted; “I haven’t done much”. I said that he had, trying to articulate through my running nose and gasping breath how much he had done for me, but in the moment, I couldn’t.
After speaking with my neurologist and spending a few months in this physical state, the gravity of my symptoms, mental, emotional and physical, begins dawning on me, and after some time I come to an awareness of the fact that I feel too weak to carry it on my own.
I still don’t know what I am, but I know what I’m not.
I remember mentally flicking through all of the training and study I had done throughout my degree, hoping desperately that there might be something, anything, on how to respond in the given situation. Alas, I came up with nothing.
I’ve never had a nightmare quite like that again. Maybe because my subconscious fear of losing my dad became more real.
Along her limbs, the connecting stitches hang loose and remnants of the past repairs remind my hands of the many lives she has lived. I was gifted her when I was a newborn and she has been my most constant companion ever since.
There’s a shot in so many Hollywood movies where the main character, separated from their loved ones, looks up at the moon and takes comfort from knowing they’re under the same sky. What about listening to old lyrics that someone dear to you loved?
As someone who has been writing in a diary since 2011, I’ve looked back at my past diaries. I’ve laughed and cringed. 12 years later, now in my early 20s, I’ve started to reflect on what they mean to me.
Degrading someone based on the way that they speak communicates a larger judgment: what you have to say isn’t valuable.
