One to Ten, How Much Does It Hurt?

 Pain Happens
Michael Sedano

July 2014, a week after the Fourth, I lie feverish, in pain, not acceding to Barbara’s demands she drive me to the emergency room. I am enjoying jubilant sounds out there, kids romping in our swimming pool. Pain comes and goes from bad to extreme. One to ten what number? Eleven. That kind of pain. I’m not convinced I’m dying until a physician, who’d been watching the kids, pushes on my abdomen and I grimace and groan. New pain atop pain i'd been holding back, convinces me.

I wake with a few punctures in my belly and waist—robo surgery, I’m told—and a plastic bag attached to my left side. A young man carbuncular, the surgeon, swaggers into the recovery room informing me he’s cured my diverticulitis. He pauses then delivers his punchline, the surgeon brags he's removed two feet of intestine. ba da boom.

I didn’t know I had diverticulitis until he tells me I don’t have it now. Peritonitis made the surgery a challenge he continues, he couldn't see too well through all the muck. Quite a challenge as it develops. 

Three days later, I turn grey and get a code blue ride to the surgical suite. Doctor comedian nicked the spleen and it is consuming itself. I’m bleeding to death. Now the surgeon slices me from sternum to abdomen to fix his fix. Who would have known the young man to have had so much blood in him?

I died during that surgery, splenectomy, but I get sent back from the other side by the ancestors telling me to get out of line. I wrote about it when the Dilaudid had worn off, in this La Bloga-Tuesday column (link).

July 2014 was as consequential a month as I’ve lived (other than August, when I was born, and married, and returned from overseas). I’d died and come back in July 2014. 

Science calls it an NDE, near death experience, but science doesn’t respect cucui, the spirits, and thinks brain chemistry, DMT, cooks up those visions and messages, “delusional ideation,” researchers call what happened to me.

Twenty-one days in the hospital teaches me to understand physical pain. I while away the hours locating the source of pain deep inside. This allows me to brace for the next wave of explosive pain so it won’t kill me again. Waves of pain blind me and I writhe into deeper agony, groaning into the empty hospital room with the world happening beyond the curtain.

This week marks my twelfth year back on this side of the curtain. I was ready to remain over there with the welcoming spirits who’d assembled. I know now why the ancestors sent me back: Barbara needed me.

Physical pain from one to ten has no counterpart for existential pain—in 2018 Barbara’s dementia of the Alzheimer’s type diagnosis delivers me into a new career as a caregiver. The disease arrives hard and quickly accelerates how she changes. What the books foretold happened one after another with relentless inevitability.

Alzheimer’s produces unrelenting all-enveloping pain in my heart and thoughts. I turn off emotion. This is now my life and I live it every moment of every day. COVID drives us to shelter in place for the rest of our lives. Barbara transitions in February 2023.

Living with Alzheimer's dementia changes both people. Only now do I possess the wholeness to write Barbara’s and my story of living with Alzheimer’s, and my new story, after Alzheimer’s.

We had only time.

Alzheimer’s happened to Barbara. She experiences it alone, by herself, I cannot share that, nor bear it in her place. Behaviors so essential to her personhood change. How painful when I recognize the absence of something as fundamental as a smile. When did I see her final smile? Why didn’t I notice? The pain of regret doesn’t diminish, only memory puts regrets in their place, deep inside where pain comes from.

In 2014 I cross to the Other Side and return. In 2018 Barbara and I begin living with Alzheimer’s dementia. I get sent back because Barbara would need me. When we’d wed on my birthday in 1968, we vowed to one another, “all the days of our lives.” 

There is no pain in joyful memories.

Home At Last, Floricanto and rrsalinas on Film

 Michael Sedano

Last January the fires of hell, aka Eaton Canyon, leveled miles of homes in Pasadena and nearly wiped Altadena off the map. My daughter's urban farm--where I'd taken residence following my wife's death with Alzheimer's Dementia--disappeared in the conflagration (link). 

We became nomads, finding shelter where we could. My granddaughter moved away to college leaving only my daughter and me in a painfully expensive, and profoundly unsatisfactory, rental house. I moved eight times since January 7, from motel to motel, city to city, rental to rental. 

From where I sit today, I can see forever. My daughter bought a beautiful home for me and my eighth move is the last one.

I'm home. I have a home. I have a place to call my own. There is life after Alzheimer's, here is some evidence.

After three days moving in and getting stuff fixed up, it was celebration time. My gente all showed up, and one, Margaret Garcia, presented me with her portrait of me, painted when I was only a few days out from losing my last known residence. Here's La Bloga-Tuesday's report  (link) on sitting for that portrait, which now will grace my walls in my new home. My art collection, reduced to ashes and memories, has begun again.

Guest Columnist Rey Rodriguez

Review: Un Trip: raúlrsalinas & the poetry of liberation, a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, documentary screening, Q&A, Flor y Canto at Beyond Baroque.

By Rey Rodriguez

On October 4, 2025, I attended at Beyond Baroque (https://www.beyondbaroque.org/), a celebration of raúl “Roy” “Tapón” salinas, an extraordinary Chicano poet who has since passed away but who left a powerful legacy of revolutionary poetry. 

Curated by Iván Salinas, the event included the screening of Un Trip: raúlsalinas & the poetry of liberation, a film by Anne Lewis and Laura Varela, and a stellar lineup of poets.

The film credits La Bloga’s Michael Sedano for his photography. At the event, Mr. Sedano described how he located lost footage of raúl salinas as salinas reads his poetry at El Festival de Flor y Canto, the movimiento’s first large-scale literary festival, at USC in 1973. I highly recommend that the reader view rrsalinas’ reading at this link: https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF113JNMZ?&WS=SearchResults&Flat=FP . 

That first floricanto would have been lost to the passage of time, but for the efforts of Mr. Sedano to seek it out and ensure that videos of all the spotlighted artists are now available for viewing by a whole new generation of students, teachers, researchers, professors, gente en general.

Parts of the 1973 reading are included in Un Trip, a short documentary, which is still seeking distribution, despite winning an audience award in Texas. After watching the documentary, it is a film that definitely deserves to be distributed widely for its historical and educational significance in Chicano history and for filling in the gaps of rrsalinas’ contributions to poetry in general.

The event also included emotional and beautiful readings from: Abel Salas, founding editor of Brooklyn and Boyle, who was personally associated with raúl r salinas; Ben V. Olguín,

Professor, Robert and Lisa Erickson Presidential Chair in English, Director of The Global Latinidades Center at UCSB, who read of his experience with the poet; Luis J. Rodríguez, author of many books, essays, poems, and founder of Tía Chuchas Cultural Center along with his activist wife Trini Rodríguez, spoke movingly of his personal connection with this master poet and the power of poetry to transform lives that may have been lost to poverty, violence and drugs; Josiah Luis Alderete, San Francisco’s Poet Laureate and co-owner of Medicine For Nightmares bookshop, who performed a poem to tlaxcalli; Iris de Anda, who read her emotional poetry; and Soledad Con Carne, a self described casually Queer, intergalactic Oakland/Ohlone-based chicanx punk poet, who acknowledges that although they had never met Mr. Salinas, their poetry was in conversation with his.

It is this conversation that intrigued me, so when the evening was over, I was fortunate enough to meet Con Carne and ask them to sign their recently published chapbook, SFV or Die, Foo, published by Lilac Press (https://www.instagram.com/lilacpressdiy/?hl=en – requires Instagram registration). 

I went home and could not put the book down. Con Carne’s voice resonates so strongly throughout their writings with poems entitled, “Carne Poetics,” “Another Memorial for a Brown Man by Smiley’s Market,” and “everything I learned at CSUN.” 

Con Carne stands with the marginalized of the San Fernando Valley and proudly expresses their divinity in their work. They remind us through their work of all that is lost if their vital voices are not heard and honored. 

Con Carne carries on the work of Mr. Salinas, and I hope you will all support their work by buying this chapbook. It is deeply profound poetry that stands on the shoulders of so many others who understand that it is the system that is corrupt and needs to be rebuilt around our mutual humanity. 

Those living in poverty or on the margins do not need fixing. They need to be expressed and heard, and they are, through the work of Soledad Con Carne and all of those who participated in the evening to celebrate raúl r salinas. 

About the writer:

Rey Rodriguez and Laura Varela

Rey M. Rodríguez is a writer, advocate, and attorney. He lives in Pasadena, California. He is working on a novel set in Mexico City and a non-fiction history of a prominent nonprofit in East LA. He has attended the Yale Writers' Workshop multiple times and Palabras de Pueblo workshop once. He also participates in Story Studio's Novel in a Year Program. He is a first-year fiction creative writing student at the Institute for American Indian Arts' MFA Program. His poetry is published in Huizache. His other interviews and book reviews can be found at La Bloga, the world's longest-established Chicana-Chicano, Latina-Latino literary blog, Chapter House's Storyteller’s Blog, Pleiades Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review.

Fotos, Ése: Floricanto at Beyond Baroque 

foto: Rey Rodriguez

soledad con carne

Iris de Anda

Josiah Luis Alderete

Luis J. Rodriguez

Abel Salas

Ben V. Olguin

Michael Sedano

I was pleased to be a Special Guest at the film showing and floricanto. When I walked into Beyond Baroque's Wanda Coleman Auditorium, the video of rrsalinas' reading at the 1973 Festival de Flor y Canto played. As the evening's guest, I related briefly the surprise I experienced in 2009 as I was leaving the world of work: a video I thought did not exist!

That video of Oscar Zeta Acosta set me on a detective search for all the other poets and readers videotaped at the movimiento's historic first Festival de Flor y Canto. I found them at UC Riverside where Juan Felipe Herrera helped me secure use of a rare U-Matic Cassette player. The ¾" format, long since abandoned by broadcasters and universities, required access to the sole surviving player in the Inland Empire. Thanks to Herrera and the UCR Tomás Rivera Library, I returned the floricanto to USC, whose institutional memory had completely erased the floricanto from local history!

My goal in digitizing the U-Matics is to make an important historical resource widely available so poets, students, teachers, familias, can see and hear some of la raza's foundational writers in their youth. Here's La Bloga-Tuesday's column on the digitizing process (link).

Coinciding with my 2010 presentation to USC of the digitized videos, I organized a reunion floricanto, Festival de Flor y Canto: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. I invited veteranas and veteranos from that 1973 festival for the "yesterday" element, and artists with publication history for the "today" element, and emerging voices just launcing their careers for the "tomorrow" element. USC's Digital Library also shares videos of that 2010 reunion, documented by Jesus Treviño's Barrio Dog Productions. Latinopia.com includes numerous videos from that 2010 reunion floricanto (link).

Here's the link to USC's digital collection that includes my photographs of the 1973 artists and the full performance videos from 1973 and 2010. You can request photographs via the library, and download the videos for non-commercial, fair use:

https://digitallibrary.usc.edu/asset-management/2A3BF15MA253?Flat=y&WS=SearchResults

Here's a compact index to the videos:

https://calisphere.org/collections/27333/

Late-Breaking News: From the Producer of Un Trip

You and a guest are invited to the special LA Screenings of the moving documentary - AMERICAN SONS  produced by Laura Varela, directed and produced by Andrew James Gonzales,  with producers Elizabeth Avellan, Fernando Cano, and Ray Telles.  AMERICAN SONS is a profoundly intimate documentary that traces the enduring scars of war through the story of Cpl. JV Villarreal, a Mexican American Marine from Texas, who was killed in action in Afghanistan. Told through raw, never-before-seen combat footage and the decade-long emotional journey of his Marine brothers and family, the film is both a tribute and a courageous exploration of grief, resilience, and love. 

Location: VIDIOTS (4884 Eagle Rock Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90041)
Date and Time: Monday, October 6 - Doors/Drinks reception 7:00 PM | Film 7:30 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 

Moderated by Claire Aguilar

Drinks reception to follow

Location: BOB HOPE PATRIOTIC HALL (1816 S Figueroa St, Los Angeles, CA 90015)
Date and Time: Wednesday, October 8 - Doors 5:00 PM | Film 5:30 PM
 
Location: PBS SoCal (3080 Bristol Street #100 Costa Mesa, CA 92626)
Date and Time: Thursday, October 9 - Doors 6:30 PM | Film 7:00 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 

Location: Film Independent (5670 Wilshire Blvd 9th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90036)
Date and Time: Friday, October 10 - Doors 6:30 PM | Film 7:00 PM
Q&A with Filmmakers and Film Participant 
Moderated by Matt Carey
Reception to follow

RSVP at AMERICANSONS@DMAGPR.COM. Please advise which screening you'd like to attend and if you are bringing a guest. 

All We Have Is Time: Memory's End

My Friend, Betty. QEPD.

Michael Sedano

 

 

“We have nothing but Time,” we told one another as we walked along garden paths. The phrase was a magic incantation for us, lost in the folds of a curtain we couldn’t see beyond. Our world held no hope, no future, only that curtain. Our spouses lived with dementia and dementia means no hope, no future, only the opacity of that curtain’s certitude that death would raise the curtain. All we had was Time.

Memory Club 2018: Michael, Kayley, Randall, Betty,
May, Julia, Tom, Rich, Barbara

 

Betty, when I met her, offered the world a vivacious redhead with a ready smile and a feisty attitude. We were members of Memory Club, six couples living with a dementia. Betty and Rich had season seats at the chamber concerts Barbara and I attended, so we joined forces, had  dinner, made a night of it. When Time weakened our spouses we stopped.

 

Betty and I sought respite walking the county Arboretum and Huntington Library's gardens, talking, remembering, making sense of the world as it found us. Rich died first. We walked and talked about being alone. Barbara died. Betty and I walked and talked about life after dementia. We were never romantic. Our friendship had weathered the most severe tests imaginable; we would hold onto our memories together.

 

Betty fell hard in a parking lot. Xrays discovered lung cancer. Our garden strolls disappeared, instead, I drove Betty to City of Hope for six months, two or three times a week. She was chronically fatigued and we did not walk anymore. I would visit Monday mornings, cook her breakfast, greet her caregiver, and go about my life. I have a new life. I missed a few visits.

Two months ago, Betty texted me. She'd moved into a hospice facility; a house in a quiet Arcadia neighborhood. I visited on Mondays, urged Betty to eat the breakfast on her tray. She wasn't particularly interested in food.

 

Last week, Michelle, a loving caregiver, texted me. Betty is in her transition period now. She sleeps a lot , doesn't eat or drink. The next day, I visited.

 

Betty spoke magic to me in what was our penultimate visit, only three days before our final visit. I sat on her bed, stroking her knee, talked about our friendship. She was frail and quiet. Her eyes opened blankly and she cried out, “ow, ow, ow,” and closed her eyes. I stared helplessly at her.

 

Then Betty opened her eyes, looked at the ceiling then looked down and made eye contact with me. “I love you,” she whispered and smiled. “I love you,” I answered. I left encouraged that she had more Time.

 

Our final visit came with sad acceptance of rapidly approaching Time. Betty's body had grown beyond frail, she was a whisper of the person I'd left only three days earlier. Now she lay eyes blank and mouth open, the oxygen cannula hanging loosely at her nose. The hospice manager told me she’d been asleep two days and only today had opened her eyes to the room around her.

 

Michelle put a chair at the bedside. I sat and leaned toward my friend. Betty smiled when she recognized me. Her mouth moved, I could see her tongue forming sound but her lips did not move. 

  

I told Betty she is strong, holding onto life with all her might. She could not see herself, I saw how cancer had already sucked all life out of her. Her alabaster-white skin covered bones on her face and arm. I held her warm hand, told her what I believe--her spirit will return to visit me in the form of a butterfly or a hummingbird when I walk the gardens. She smiled. I told her I was going to the Arboretum to sit on the bench she willed to the garden. 

Betty whispered sentences that I could not make out, her body no longer possessed energy to form words. But Goodness came from her body, from that small weakened smile, from the breaths that should have been words. Even though I did not understand her final whispers to me, I think she was repeating the last words I remember she said to me, “I love you.”

 

Monday, December 30, Time ran out for Betty. She died quietly in her hospice bed, only a mile from the Arboretum where we walked seeking respite, understanding, and biding our Time.

 

Ten Year Anniversary: That Time of Year

That time of year
Michael Sedano

 

Ten years ago, July 2014, I met my fate. I died in post-op ICU.

 

Trouble started two weeks before with sharp abdominal pain that grew over a few days. I followed a doctor's advice to aguantarlo and take a tablet analgesic, call him if it grew worse. Pain grew worse and I aguantared as the weekend begins. Pain drives me to lie in a darkened bedroom delighting at the laughter from kids splashing in the pool. I wanted those to be the last sounds I hear, fever and pain totally overwhelm me. 

Barbara insists I go to the ER. She drags me off the mattress, directing me get in the car. Barbara always knew best.

 

Peritonitis raged from a perforated colon, the source of that pain. I'm wheeled quickly to an operating room and lights out. I'm fixed.

 

I come-to in a comfortable room where kind women have settled me into a hospital bed and get me on my feet. The surgeon visits to explain what he's done, and brags to me he cured my diverticulitis by removing two feet of my large intestine. The surgeon feels all heroic that, with a camera and robot knives he’s poked into my insides, he’s redesigned my midsection, cut an organ, added a plastic bag at the waist for waste, and sealing off the rest.

The doc doesn't know he's mucked up. My spleen, an innocent bystander in the process of peritonitis clean-up and sigmoid colectomy with end colostomy, was nicked by a robot knife. 

My post-op ward nurses encourage me to take walks, side-by-side with a stainless steel tree dangling tubes and swaying hanging bags bulging with fluids. 

I take an experimental short sojourn and tolerate the effort. I take a much longer walk and even cross over the bridge between Huntington Hospital’s twin towers to gaze across the city rooftops to the mountains. 

Inside my sinews, where the sun don’t shine, I'm bleeding from a Spleen busy consuming itself, doing its job.

 

The day after my bridge walkabout, Barbara begins her daily visit making small talk and concerned inquiries. I mumble fatuous responses or not at all. I can't keep my eyes open. I feel myself slump down in the recliner chair I occupy, eyes closed, aware only that I am surrounded by room noise.

 

"He’s turned grey", or "He’s all grey", Barbara calls with alarm out the door. A pair of rubber-soled shoes squeal as the nurse wheels out the door to pick up a phone. In a minute, strong hands lift me onto a rolling table, strap me down and wheel me at high speed along hallways wheels protest at hard left and hard right turns. The gurney hits aluminum thresholds hard with the front wheels then hitting hard with the rear wheels. Each ka-bump intensifies pain in my belly forcing my eyes open to prove I'm still alive. Ceiling tiles scroll past interrupted by fluorescent fixtures marked by brown waterspots, dead insect shadow, the light too bright but only while I’m directly under.

 

Into the incredibly bright surgery room someone pushes the gurney. For a moment I grow alert. Dang, there’s a lot of people here. Some of them grab me and pull me onto a tiny hard table. A woman on my right whose masked face doesn't conceal beautiful brown eyes and skin pushes a needle into a tube someone has stuck into my arm. Here it comes, she announces.

 

The next time I come to is after being sent back from the other side. I wrote about it in La Bloga ten years ago, almost as soon as the big pain had subsided. Here's a link to that column.

 

https://labloga.blogspot.com/2014/07/get-out-of-line.html

 

I was three days in ICU before I woke momentarily to whisper “burn sage.” Then I woke to a deluxe corner room with the hospital’s best nurses and nurse assistants, people came to visit me and see the dead man for themselves, after 21 days in that bed I got solid food, pooped, and got sent home again. Thanks to the teachers union contract, Blue Shield covered almost every expense.

 

Science calls my crossing over a “near death experience.” NDE inform a rich body of academic writing and study, I'm not unique. A large majority of researchers offer chemical-based explanations for NDE, that stressed human brains produce psychedelic DMT, the entire NDE is a freak out, a mind trip. There is no ‘there’ there. 

 

Ni modo, the DMT tipos are wrong. Raza know there's another side because we live with cucui. I've been to The Other Side, so have others. I’d read about NDE back in grad school, dozens of years before I died. There's lot of material on the computer.

 

People who come back share a variety of profound perceptions about what happened to them. Over time, people realize their NDE brings behavioral consequences. A model of post-NDE behavior called the Life Changes Inventory, says gente show  “increased concern for others, lessened fear of death, increased belief in an afterlife, increased religiosity, and decreased desire for material success and approval of others.” Link to PDF 

 

Some of these outcomes describe me, but more that anything, for years after, I wanted to know why the heck it happened, to me in particular. Why did I get sent back in 2014? I wondered and marveled. Indeed, it was a gift. Now I know.

 

The ancestors sent me back in 2014 to take care of Barbara during our life with Alzheimer’s Dementia. We were diagnosed in 2018. She lived until 2023. 

I understand, now, the ancestors knew Barbara would need me to be there for her. It all makes sense. Barbara saved my life two times before I got sent back--dragging me to the ER and noticing I was bleeding to death--so I could give her the best life possible when she had no choice but to depend completely on me, as we promised, all the days of our lives.

 

There is life after Alzheimer's. I have a new life. The bare ruined choirs will have to wait, I hear the sweet birds sing. 

Caregiver's Permanent Respite: Untrapping Memories

Road Trip to Liberate A Past

Michael Sedano

 

My wife died a year ago, five years after we were hit with the diagnosis, Dementia of the Alzheimer's type. 

 

February fourth marked the one year commemoration of Barbara's life and our fifty-five years together. I had lived in a numb kind of ongoing mourning through our five years. With Barbara gone I was flooded by memories and I was drowning in them.

 

I took a trip to make sense of those 55 years, to put the memories to rest by visiting where they happened. The process would complete the "after Alzheimer's" part of the rest of my life. In these spaces, I would release the mourning of all we lost when the disease struck, and liberate myself from remembering those five years of fearful progression from diagnosis to the last moment together.

 

It was just the worst time of year for such a journey. Pa'lla, threatening horizons swallow all the light, but rain holds back as I drive into the great central valley down the Grapevine. A few hours on, Pacheco Pass, a special wonder of wildflowers, lies fallow, its naked contours covered with newgrown grasses, how promising for Spring.

Pacheco Pass hillside soon to be covered with wildflowers

 

A planned detour takes me into Hollister. Years ago, I picked fruit in Hollister and Morgan Hill, but I am not here to remember my primos and their bracero step-father. I visit an Army friend, the fire-control operator on Mae Bong whom I shared many an hour with. It is good some friendships don't change very much despite fifty years' separation.

 

I expect the rest of the trip to disclose change. I want to find those changes in those places to discard the memories they hold. The towns, particular lodgings, a big bowl of cioppino on the wharf, cheese and wine overlooking Big Sur, elegant food at local fine dining eateries, I want to repeat most of these experiences, but I want to free myself of having to remember everything that happened before. Caregivers deserve permanent respite from those years of responsibility and mourning, in my case, fifty-five years bounded by five years prolonged and painful separating.

 

Barbara and I traveled not much. The California coast was a favored place since 1968 when we took our honeymoon along the coast. Repeated trips over the years invested special places with memories that compelled us to feel no urgency to find different locations. "Remember that time..." became a conversation starter as we drove to a longed-for destination.

Pt. Lobos iconic vista

Those places define my itinerary. Highway 1 along the California coast. Up the Central Valley up to Pacheco Pass. On through Steinbeck country to Monterey. A day at Pt. Lobos and the drive to Big Sur, Nepenthe, and Cambria. A few miles down Highway 1, Morro Bay. Then Isla Vista and Santa Barbara. 

 

Nothing's the same. We met in Isla Vista. Our apartments still stand. The house I got drafted out of, on Ortega Street in town, is a grassy field. UCSB eliminated the Speech Department, remodeled the department offices into a box office.

 

I am glad everything changed, nothing remains what it had been. I am refreshed by all these changes, reminded how fragile is the past no matter the weight of memory.

 

Ft. Ord is gone and our rental shack on the old highway might be a shopping mall now; I can't figure out where Cypress Knolls was amid today's acres of ticky-tacky. 

Cambria's finest dining

 

Some memories are denied me by natural forces. 

 

Pt. Lobos got ravaged by years of waves eating away pathways. The sea has forbidden my revisiting scenes of treasured memories. The atmospheric river closes down Highway1 at Big Sur and my route must backtrack inland to the Paso Robles cut-off to Morro Bay. The road trip plan turns chaotic.

 

I had infused these places with memories. Revisiting a favorite place evokes memories, brings things back all at once. Now I don't want them to do that to me, evoke painful reminders. 

 

These spaces become haunting reminders of joy and the last five years all at once. Joyful places overflow with regret.  I love these places for themselves and they deserve liberation from trapped and sequestered memories. As I begin the road trip, I feel urgency to free these places from those memories. I shall put a crack in the wall of time to let the light out, to let new eyes see what's there. I want to return to places with new friends and I want to visit them as if for the first time, fill them with new memories.

 

I took my sorrow on a road trip and left pieces of it behind in now-unfamiliar places that held once-favored memories. Those memories, like living with Alzheimer's dementia, need to be put away. This is how, after Alzheimer's, a new beginning can happen. 

 

Fiat lux. Adelante.

 

I have often walked on this street before. And the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before. Until I saw Barbara for the first time in the foreground building. I lived down at the end of the street.
Madrid Road is just another street in Isla Vista, to me.