The doctor wasn’t listening. A receptionist had accused her of making things up. The medicine in the chest patch she wore to maintain her cognition made her so nauseous that she went to the hospital. The Rev. Carolyn Habersham had a sermon to deliver at the end of that week, but her brain had been gradually deteriorating. That made the normal few hours of preparation stretch for days. Habersham said it was her week of revelation.
Habersham, who lives in the Hyde Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, is 72 years old. It was in that week in August that she saw how her fading memory was getting worse. More than a year ago, in September 2023, she had already stopped cooking and driving, activities she recognized had become unsafe for her: She had left pots on a burning stove. She did not want to hurt anyone if she could not remember the rules of the road while behind the wheel. But when she struggled to compose her sermon at the end of this summer, and knew she would not be able to remember it at the pulpit, she saw that she was losing who she was. She also knew who she wanted to become: an advocate for African Americans with dementia.
