January 3, 2025

My last post was November 6, 2022. I wrote about my gratitude for those who helped me recover from breaking my legs. That gratitude endures.

Not long after that post, on Christmas Eve 2022, my brother Tom died. It was his birthday and a blanket of snow and ice covered Portland, weather he would have loved. Tom is the third of my family to die at the hands of dementia. My mother passed away, also at Christmas, in 2005. My older brother died in 2016.

Since 2020, I have been writing about my thirty year journey with dementia. In the two years since Tom’s death, I have completed my manuscript - a collection of letters I wrote to dementia, beginning when Tom entered a nursing home until his death, a span of almost 2 years.

These days, I am looking for an agent to help usher my work into the wider world. This is a harder task than I imagined, but I am learning and growing and glad for the help and advice that comes my way from friends and strangers alike.

I loved writing this blog. It helped me get comfortable with making my personal writing public, and I am thankful to all of you for reading my posts and for your generous comments.

Now, I am moving my writing to the Substack. Many writers I admire post work on the platform - Alice Dark, David Whyte, Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, and many more. I like the longer literary format and I hope it will be a place to build a community interested in my work.

For now, I’m leaving behind the ‘Before I Forget” theme and will be continuing my letters to Dementia. I wrote what I thought was my last letter a few days after Tom died. I thought my relationship with Dementia was over. But I was wrong. Though the rest of my siblings seem free from its grasp, others that I know and love have been claimed. Dementia attacks 10 million people worldwide every year and apparently I still have plenty to say to this cruel interloper.

Thank you for taking the time to read my words, to offer your support and your words of encouragement.

The journey continues…..on Substack. You can find me at annedlen.substack.com.