(Chirping) Ooh, look at them.

(Bird call) You go first.

It, it happens to me sometimes that I just hear the words, but it's as if takes time to translate it into meaning.

My name is Gerda Saunders.

At the age of sixty-something, it was affirmed that I have the precursor of dementia a microvascular disease.

The good part about that is I ride the bus.

That loss of independence is the worst for me.

Um, I believe that when I have my memory tested again, that I will fall under the third stage of dementia.

The first two stages are precursor stages where you notice losses, but they don'’’t are not very detrimental to your life.

They interfere, but not to a great extent.

Whereas, in the third stage, you really start needing I don't walk freely in an unfamiliar environment anymore, because I find I can'’’t find my way after a while.

I feel like I'm not well-balanced on the earth.

You know like, like I could stumble.

The closest I could think of now is um, when you go through a Halloween haunted house.

When you walk, and they make the floor underneath your feet like, tilt.

It's a little bit of a feeling like - maybe not that physical but, a mental tilting of my world.

When you're an immigrant, you make family.

Even though I'm disconcerted by the fact that my mental world is fading, I am very much boosted by the fact that my communal world is putting out fingers to sort of fill the holes in the dyke, of that part of myself.

That's how I succumb to it.

Here I am and and the love just flows in and kind of holds me in this space.

I had a funny moment last night.

My grandson who's almost three came over.

And I did something stupid I with his hat.

I put it on his head the wrong way around or something, and then we put it the right, and we were laughing about the wrong way around hat.

So, his mom Marissa said, "Oh that was just Oma being silly."

And so, I said well actually, Oma has dementia.

That's why I do these things.

So I say to Dante, say that, "Oma has dementia."

So he said something like that and we just laughed.

So it's it'’’s something that we laugh about and that I'’’m trying to make part of my grandchildren's lives.

This is what an Oma looks like who has dementia.

As he grows, and as my dementia worsens, it will be part of that silly moment we had that got kind of integrated into this is also who I am.