Recently, I've been casting jigsaw pieces out of plaster. They don't come out 'clean' so after the plaster has hardened enough to release them from the mold, but while it's still pliable enough to carve, I have the tedious task of cleaning them up. And as I scrape away at the edges, hands turning white and a little bit slimy from the damp of the plaster, I spend a lot of time thinking about the significance of what I'm making, why I'm making it, and the material I'm using. Let's start with the form itself: jigsaw pieces. Why these? Ever since starting this project, jigsaws have been on my mind. This is for a couple of reasons. First, there's the obvious connection to be made between a puzzle and the brain. Each indivdual piece represents a neural connection and when all of the pieces fit together, a complete picture is formed. This might be a memory, a thought, or an action. In dementia, these pieces become more difficult to link together as those neural connections are lost. Plaques build up in the brain, tau proteins are truncated, allowing for the normally streamline and efficient lines of connectivity to become a tangled mess. This interrupts thoughts as the neurons no longer have the ability to make these rapid-fire connections they once did. A bit like a magnet getting so covered in fuzz and dust that its grabbing power is reduced. Sometimes that build-up is so thick, that its power is completely lost. The other reason jigsaws have been on my mind is because they're often touted as a tool for staving off dementia and in fact, they've played a big role in our family helping my mother-in-law navigate those murky waters she's drowning in. I can't begin to count the hours I've sat with her, helping her to build a picture piece by painful piece. These moments offer me a glimpse into what life might be like for her as the disease eats away at her brain; she will often remark on bits she sees in each individual piece but fails to see how, individually, they connect with each other. A colour might be mentioned or a shape. And while she might recognise a similiarity between the piece she's holding in her hand and a piece on the board, putting them together or understanding that how they work to form a picture is lost.
My next question to ponder is why use plaster? I started using plaster as an inexpensive way of experimenting with the idea of casting which I could do without any specialist equipment. I first got the idea of casting after seeing the work Rebecca Chesney was doing with making porcelain casts of thorns. There was such a delicate and simple beauty in those pieces that was really evocative to me. One day as I was digging a rose bush out of my garden, I found myself engrossed with the tangled root-mass and how like the plaque tangles in the brain they were. I knew I wanted to steal Rebecca's idea and cast them. But I wanted to explore the idea in more depth first. I started with those tangled tiles and then dipped a few of the roots in plaster to see what it looked like and really liked the outcome. There's something really beautiful about the smooth whiteness of the material that pulls me in. Working with plaster can be tricky - if you mix it with too much water it takes ages to dry and can easily crumble. If you don't have enough water it has a tendency to set very quickly and won't adhere properly to itself and it just crumbles. But when you get the mix just right, it will be pliable enough to work with after it's semi-hardened, making it somewhat durable. Yet, it retains a fragility and can be very brittle. It's this fragility that is really important to me as a material. Having jigsaws made from plaster make them impossible to fit together without them breaking. Also, their varied thickness prevents you from connecting them. Should you be successful in this attempt, they wouldn't match up anyway. Because the casts don't come out clean, a certain amount of carving is required to clean them up. Many are broken in the process, which again lends itself well to the idea of loss which I'm trying to capture in my work. And then there's that creamy whiteness of plaster that really fits in well with this idea of a jigsaw reading like the mind; in theory, these pieces will fit together because they're cast from pieces that form a complete puzzle. Even if you were to able to get past the fragility of the objects and fit them together, it will never form a picture because they are devoid of imagery. This becomes an even more poignant use of jigsaws as a way of explaining dementia than Klein's work - which doesn't purport to anway. But it is a way of explaining how looking at the work of two artists informed my creative approach.
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We are in a stage of our human development where the mass of things we’ve built is equal to the mass of all living things on the planet (Aridi, 2020), which suggests a fantastic (and incomprehensible) amount of creation and making of stuff, much of which is useless or made to satisfy an impulsive urge. Yet, things are disappearing all around us: glaciers are melting; forms of life are regularly facing extinction if they’ve not already died out; lines of definition are constantly shifting and getting blurred (sexual, political, boundaries, gender). So, it’s perhaps no surprise how immediately and fully I was drawn to Vanishing, the first exhibition hosted by This Gallery, a gallery which began as an online-only presence in 2020 and is now a bricks and mortar building based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. I’m not typically drawn to online exhibitions – whilst they might be visually intriguing, there is something about the investigation of works in-situ that an online viewing can’t typically match. Visiting an exhibition in person allows you to immerse yourself completely into an artwork and involves all the senses. Recently, I participated in a workshop held at Tate Liverpool where our group was invited to sit in front of two paintings and practise two mindfulness techniques: first to close our eyes and focus on the sounds within the gallery; then to sit and look at one painting for two full minutes. The point of the exercise was to notice what we might otherwise miss if we weren’t actively engaging with our surroundings. Although we used art in a gallery setting as the subject for this exercise, we could have been anywhere. Regardless of location or subject-matter, the idea is the same: having a mindful presence in the space you occupy allows you to appreciate the nuance of what is in front of you. I found the exercise to be enlightening and reaffirming; I realised that to a degree I already practise this technique when viewing artwork and it’s something I try to imbue in other aspects of my life as well. The experience highlighted that it can be easy to get overwhelmed when all of our senses are involved and in closing out just one of them, our other senses are intensified. Top row from left to right: Lara Buffard (Greece), Mackenzie Abernethy (USA), Karyna Aslanova (UK) Bottom row from left to right: Tony Bowen (UK), Shelby Charlesworth (USA), Ron Shelton (USA) Maybe the experience I undertook at Tate allowed me to pause when I found this online exhibition. It changed the way I might normally approach looking at online images. Instead of skimming and skipping around, I found myself resting on the images I was presented with. There was something so poignant and fresh about the collection of work comprised in Vanishing, that I found myself going back to it repeatedly. And this is the great thing about online exhibitions – you can do that so easily. You don’t need to gear up to visit a gallery in person and work out all of the details that goes along with that process; there is no driving or taking the train. If you have children, there is no need to get them ready, snacked up, kitted out – and no need to prepare yourself with the anxiety of what they might be like once you get them out. You can enter this virtual gallery space as and when you are able. So, although you might miss out on a full sensory experience, you are able to engage in a way that perhaps you might not when you visit a gallery in the flesh. I struggle to recall what web search brought this exhibition to my attention; presumably it is because I’m currently working on a project for my MA in Fine Art which focuses on the loss associated with dementia and was searching for artists whose work I could study. The title word for the exhibition – Vanishing – is, in itself, quite a captivating word. The collection of work equally so. As I scrolled through the images, I found myself exploring the body of work as I would in person: slowing absorbing one image before moving on to the next and resting on whatever image grabbed my interest to learn more. There are 45 artists represented in this show, so trying to absorb everything in one shot was next to impossible. Over the course of a couple weeks, I found myself returning to the exhibition to look in more detail at artists whose work I overlooked or didn’t fully engage with in previous visits. Even as I write this review, I find myself returning to the site to reference artists and works and continue to be find myself absorbed by the work. It’s completely impractical to try to review each artist’s work in a single exhibition review, so I’ve chosen a select few to speak about here.
In these works, Slavick reveals a macabre beauty in a place where unfathomable, violent destruction took place leaving a toxic legacy in its wake. Sorrowful and gripping, for me they also are a symbol of hope and the strength of lifeforce to reclaim its rightful home.
In my own work I’ve been drawn to the idea of ghost images; I’m exploring ways in which I can provide a visual interpretation of something that has been lost. With her Vestige drawings, Canady achieves this with beautiful simplicity that doesn’t feel forced or contrived. Although she is inspired by trauma and loss (Pawliw and Bryn Klare, 2020), Canady’s work is wonderfully open to interpretation and allows the viewer to insert their own stories based on individual experiences into the reading of the work. In this way, Canady’s work has the ability to reach – and make an impact upon – a broad audience. Arguably the most captivating work included in Vanishing is by Kellie Bornhoft, who won This Gallery’s “Now You See It Now You Don’t” award. It’s easy to see why. In a practice which “seeks tangible and poetic narratives needed in an ever-warming climate” (Bornhoft, date unavailable), Bornhoft uses a wide range of media and methods to realise her vision. Drawings, found objects, poetry, and video are among the elements she uses to create impactful sculptures and installations. For Vanishing, Bornhoft exhibited two video pieces which combined poetry and performance. In Portage, you can just barely make out the whispered story Bornhoft reels as she approaches a receding glacier in Alaska. She begins at the site of a visitor centre which was built 40 years ago at the foot of the glacier. From there, she skis for three miles across a frozen lake to catch a peek of the vibrant blue of the glacier which has been receding at an ever-increasing speed over the last several decades (Pawliw and Bryn Klare, 2020). The 4-minute-long video offers up a mysterious and ethereal, but startlingly convincing, experience of walking through thick arctic fog, highlighted starkly by black shards of distant snow-covered mountains. The image is blurry; ghost-like snowflakes occasionally land on the camera lens. You are forced to concentrate to hear what Bornhoft is whispering which she’s doing because there was a warning of a possible avalanche – a situation that happens with much greater frequency in recent years due to the impact of global warming. As she begins her walk, Bornhoft whispers, “we had to whisper because it was a warm day. Warm enough for rain. The snow was heavy. The lake ice was warm.” The otherwise stillness of the video is punctuated by the muted crunch of footsteps and the soft swishing of legs clad in snow pants. Bornhoft continues to tell the story of how the frozen lake she is walking across used to be a glacier. The glacier has receded by three miles and is no longer visible from the big windows in the visitor’s centre which was built at the base of the glacier 40 years ago. As she continues on her journey, the visibility diminishes to near white-out and of her whispering I could just barely make out her saying, “we travelled in the same direction for hours and saw no one else. Skis, whispers, and silence. We stopped at the centre of the lake to stay clear of the mountains. The mountains just waiting to shed their warm, heavy snow.” The white-out continues for several more minutes until finally it gives way suddenly to a pop of bright blue that you only see in ice and snow. At this sight Bornhoft whispers, “we came around the corner. Blue. It had been hours since we’d seen colour.” The video ends with this staying image of the blue glacier and Bornhoft explaining that they turned around and walked back, a return journey that she knew would be a repetition of the arduous hours in bleak landscape.
It starts with image of water – at first, it’s unclear if this is a river or the ocean. Pieces float on top, the debris steadily moving. A violin is sadly humming in the background, evoking an immediate sense of sadness and a tightening in the chest. The screen splits in two; on the left, a large rock of white chalk is being pushed across black asphalt. On the right images of what appear to be a dried waterbed fade in a scrolling reel of similar images, super-imposed with an image of growing fissures. The background continues to shift, the imagery always changing. Sometimes the overlay of fissures is constant, other times it appears to slowly dissolve and wash away, only to start again. The image on the right switches to text impressed on wet sand that reads, “brittle bonds yield fatal fissures.” The rock of chalk continues to be painstakingly pushed across the asphalt, visible catching on bumps in the surface – the effort is slow, intentional and responsive to the surface it’s being pushed across. The hands that push this big rock sometimes pause, either to rest or to try for a better grip, then continues on that same path. On the right, the tide rushes in, washing away those delicate words. All the time that humming of the violin, sad and slow, singing out an elegy. The video stops altogether and is swapped for two new images; this time the text in sand is on the left, a chalk rock on the right. The words in sand read: “this shifting/shaking land evades drawn bounds” and the rock is now a delicate aqua colour – not unlike the colour of glaciers. In fact, it almost looks like a chunk of ice which has fallen from a glacier. Except instead of landing in the sea, it finds itself sitting on a cold, unforgiving concrete slab. Hands pick up the visibly heavy rock, lift it so that it is resting precariously on one point of contact, turns it slowly, then turns it again before gripping it with both hands, heaves it up and bashes it down. Pieces of the rock shear off. Bang! Shards fall. To the left, a wave comes in, washing over the words. Crunch. The text in sand is reappears, untouched. Smash. This pattern continues, mimicking the constant motion of waves falling on the beach. Lara Buffard (Greece), Mackenzie Abernethy (USA), Karyna Aslanova (UK)
Bottom row from left to right: Tony Bowen (UK), Shelby Charlesworth (USA), Ron Shelton (USA) As the piece comes to an end Bornhoft returns to the image of her pushing the chalk rock across pavement; by now the small bolder has shrunk to the size of a rock which easily fits in the palm of the hand. Embedded in the sand next to this are the words “stagnant concern/at forecasted ruins/cataclysms to come (already)/engraved deep striations”. The chalk continues to be pushed across the pavement until it nearly disappears. The glacially blue rock continues to be smashed. Until nothing remains. In a work like Portage, the artist has provided a very clear roadmap of how to read the work. Still, I was able to take from it more than the message she was very successful in delivering. I found myself getting lost in the repetitive sound of footsteps and could feel her environment; it was distinctly different to the sound you might hear in a forest or even in a lush valley set between majestic mountains rising into the heavens. I would imagine those worlds to sound open, clear, and large. But with Portage, I felt as if my senses of sight and sound were dampened, covered in wool. It’s a feeling I’ve very rarely experienced in the UK, but back in my native homeland of the Midwest, USA it was a common occurrence throughout the winter with its frequent snowfalls and blizzards. Again, it's this ghost-like sensory experience that resonates with me and I can’t help but make connections to my own practice as I seek ways to portray the sense of loss, fragility, and decay as experienced in dementia. Of course, there is a natural cross-over of themes here; the obvious being vanishing, which is of course the title of this exhibition. But in each of these artists works I’ve highlighted in this review, there is a sense of loss – predominantly the loss of environment. But there is also decay. Slavick’s gelatine print of the persimmon tree encapsulates this wonderfully. To see a tree so laden with fruit you can almost feel the weight of would be a sight within itself. But, to see it in a black and white photograph with the colour inverted so the sky is black and the tress is the eerie colour of ash, makes it seem as if you can actually feel the tree rotting, so palpable is the image. The power of art is that it communicates to us in ways that the limited effectiveness of words can’t. They can hit us with a potent force and help us make connections, even if the connections we make weren’t those necessarily intended by the artist. Because I’ve studied the works in this exhibition through the lens of someone losing a loved one to dementia, the connection I made is the obvious: the dissolving of person, a little bit at a time. I know that this connection will be shared by some, but not by all who view these works. Some might make the link to our environment, uncertainty about the future, dreams, war. Whatever the conclusion, one thing is certain: a connection will be made. And that’s the beauty of visual communication; it’s open to interpretation in a way that written words aren’t. Once that connection is made, especially if it’s an emotive one, we’re hard-pressed to walk away without giving it another thought. And in this way, art can lead to change. Not all of the time and not by everyone. But all it takes is one person. After all, a domino run just needs the nudge of one of its pieces to start a chain reaction. Cite References: Aridi, R (2020) ‘Human-made Materials Now Weigh More Than All Life on Earth Combined’. Smithsonian Magazine. Available at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/human-made-materials-now-weigh-more-all-life-earth-combined-180976522 (Accessed 10 April 2022) Bornhoft, K (date unknown). Shifting landscapes static bounds. Available at http://www.kelliebornhoft.com (Accessed 25 April 2022) Canady, E (2020). Available at https://www.erincanady.com/untitled (Accessed 25 April 2022) Pawliw, S and Bryn Klare, B (2020). Available at https://thisgallery.org/project/elin-slavick-after-hiroshima-nagasaki-and-fukushima (Accessed 24 April 2022) Slavick, E (2022) About. Available at http://www.elinoharaslavick.com/about.html (Accessed 25 April 2022) Artists featured in this article include: Elin Slavick (http://www.elinoharaslavick.com) Erin Canady (https://www.erincanady.com/) Karyna Aslanova (https://aslanova.myportfolio.com/) Kellie Bornhoft (http://www.kelliebornhoft.com/) Lara Buffard (http://www.larabuffard.com/) Mackenzie Abernethy (https://www.mackenzieabernethy.com/) Shelby Charlesworth (https://www.shelbycharlesworth.com/) Ron Shelton (https://ronsheltonartstudios.com/) Tony Bowen (https://www.tonybowen.info/) Sometimes when I'm putting my daughter to bed she asks me to stay with her. Tonight as I laid next to her, engulfed in the coziness of her duvet and lulled by her gentle breathing, I was looking up at her ceiling which is covered with these butterflies with glow-in-the-dark designs on their wings. The glowing effect is quite delicate, much like the wings of a butterfly, so you are able to make them out if you take your time, letting your eyes adjust to the darkness. I tried to focus on one of the butterlies and when I did the darkness seemed to envelop my vision, but in a very slow and creeping way - almost like a blanket being slowly pulled over my eyes. If I looked away I was able to pick up the glow in my peripheral vision and then I could see it again, but only for a brief moment because once I tried to focus on it, it would once again retreat into darkness. I played this game several times and it got me to thinking about my mother-in-law with whom I spent a good deal of time today. It was an off day for her. She was completely lost in her mind, the vacancy in her eyes more pronounced than usual. And it made me wonder if this losing and regaining of sight in my daughter's room is a bit what it must be like for her: images coming into focus for a flash of time before being clouded over. And it also made me think about her as a person and that loss. She's there. I can touch her and see her. But she's also not there, certainly not in the way she used to be before the disease started eating away at her internal wiring.
So here we are occupying a world that seems very real to us, yet we are limited by what we can see within its sphere. And that can sometimes prevent us from trying to connect with those that we love who are stepping deeper into that realm we can't see. It feels uncomfortable, the idea of hugging a ghost. Yet, they're not yet gone, not yet left this world and so not ghosts at all. Nor are they fully realised individuals, at least not as we once understood them to be. It can be sad and difficult to navigate. But I'm not quite ready to let go. Not just yet. So the best I can do is to share the space she occupies and try to imagine what the view is like of that world she has unique insight into but which I can't access. Maybe if I turn my vision away I'll be rewarded with a brief glimpse into that world, just like those glow-in-the-dark wings that gently cling to the ceiling in my daughter's room.
The mind is kind of like that, though, isn't it? We spend a lifetime building layers of thought, language, perception, memories in our amazing minds and then at some point we begin to shed those layers and for those with dementia, live lives in reverse. Faded wallpaper gains vibrancy, is unpasted from the wall, rolled back onto a tube, put back on a shelf in a store, rewound from an industrial printing press, becomes blank paper, becomes pulp which is then formed into wood chips, which re-attach themselves to the trees they were stripped from, becomes a seed. A life unravelled.
Like it or not, decay is a normal part of the life cycle; yes, mold will feast on dead things and it can look gross. But we need it. It aids in decomposition which makes way for new growth. And I would argue that even in a brain whose decay is advanced by various forms of dementia, a certain beauty is revealed. If we are quiet and patient, we can sometimes hear fantastic sounds presented by someone with dementia. It might be a snippet of a deeply imbedded thought that came from a childhood which happened 60 years ago; or it could be a line from a long-forgotten song or nursery rhyme. Those moments offer us a glimpse into the life of a person that happened before you or I were born. In that way we are offered a time portal which is indeed a marvellous thing.
Note: the QR code in the above images will take you to the sound recording mentioned here.
Nothing will happen in time to bring you back from the empty places where dementia is taking you, my mother, or from the grey havens towards which you have set your lovely white sails.
The project I'm working on is focused on dementia with the themes of loss, fragility, and decay at the root of my research-based practise. My research has involved a lot of reading: online articles, excerpts from scientific journals, memoirs, novels. Much of my research is based in personal observations as I watch my mother-in-law being slowly stripped away by this cruel disease. I feel like my life is entrenched in this fantastic, cruel, and intriguing world of fading or jumbled up memories, strange speech, awkward movements, and hallucinations. Spending time in my mother-in-law's company is not unlike living in a dream. I know a lot of people find the witness of dementia and the effect it has on their loved ones distressing - and it is - but I find it utterly fascinating. I find myself trying to crawl into her world, sharing that surreal landscape with her, to see if I can identify what makes her cry, what makes her laugh, what makes her pick up her brush and place it on top of her plate. Don't get me wrong, there are sad times. I've noticed over the past two years that the way she looks at photo albums - which used to be our go-to activity when everything else failed - has changed. She often doesn't recognise her children. Sometimes she doesn't recognise her husband. Where photographs of certain life events used to jog her memory and prompt conversation, they now register nothing. There's just a blank space where those memories used to be filed.
Something else that I think can be really powerful is the written word, especially poetry. As I witness the dissolving of my mother-in-law's ability to read, speak, and write this idea becomes even more prescient. Offering a visual depiction of that dissolution is incredibly evocative to me. For my interim exhibition I included a piece of work that combines art and poetry which is shown above. Because I'm trying to blend the idea of domesticity (ie: everyday life) with art and the written word, I landed on a way to do that by using an embroidery hoop to serve as a frame for this work. What you see above is the poem (on the right) which has been used to create the piece of work (on the left) which was made by stretching Senka-Shi Kozo paper over the hook and gluing the printed poem to the back. The poem itself is meant to evoke the sense of something fading and unravelling and layering it with the delicate Japanese paper takes that idea a sense further so that what you see is very ghost-like and is very much like trying to view something through a thick fog. The images above show a piece of work which is an embossing on paper stretched onto an embroidery hoop which has then been embroidered into. It's symbolic of the tangles that build up in the brain for someone with dementia. The embossing was made from a collographic plate in which I glued string and thread onto a piece of circular mat board. The embroidery further investigates the idea of the tangles - the thread is left intentionally tangled and messy with parts of the thread loosely dangling down. Again I'm trying to blend domesticity with a piece of art to promote the idea of living with the condition of dementia.
The clock just turned to 4am. I've been awake for...who knows? An hour. Two? As I lie there not sleeping, my mind won't let go of thinking about my final project for my MA in Fine Art. My theme is dementia - particularly loss, fragility and decay. I'm also drawn to ghost memories and the imprinting of memories. I keep asking myself, "How are you going to effectively portray the loss suffered in dementia? What can you do that's unique but also impactful?" All of these images keep coming to mind, all of these thoughts, but none of them very clear. I have the start of an idea, but can't seem to visualise any of them to completion. So then I start thinking about dementia itself. So that's what I want to focus on for now. Just in this moment. Because maybe then that loop of ideas and imagery that is swirling in my brain will just slow down or even stop for awhile so I can get back to sleep.
There are various forms of dementia. But I'm currently thinking of vascular dementia - the one in which blood flow to the brain is restricted and this basically causes the brain to shrink. When I try to make sense of this, I see it as a film being played in reverse with the most newly formed memories fading away first. So that as the disease progresses you lose your place in time. You might recognise your grandchildren for a little while, but not remember them being born. Then you lose the memory of your children. Then your marriage. Going on like this until you're a small child living with your parents. Those are the visions pushing themselves to the forefront so that you have no recollection of the house you actually live in and find yourself confused because you're expecting to find all of the comforts of your childhood home. But where are your siblings? Where is your mum and dad? What is mad is that dementia can start eating away at our gray matter 20 years before we notice our first symptoms. So if I think of my mother-in-law, who is my inspiration behind my project, if you will...she is 75. So she would have been 55 when her disease started to slowly eat away at her brain. At that time she was still relatively young. Still working (she was a primary school teacher). Had an active social life. Was going out on walks - no one could outwalk her. I first met her when she was 63. She was retired by then, but still working, socialising, and walking. In fact, my partner (her son) had a dog when we got together and it was she that was in the habit of walking the dog when my partner was at work. When I came to live with him, I would go out on long walks with my soon-to-be mother-in-law. We'd chat. Laugh. She helped me in every way she could: helping to clean, sewing jobs, driving me around to get me acquainted with my new surroundings. She was so capable and loving and had such a spark. She loved a good laugh, was a whiz at cracking codeword puzzles and disentangling anagrams. She was great fun at the pub, the first to down her half-pint of ale (she always ordered a half-pint under the guise that she wasn't going to drink much, a threat that never came to fruition) and had a glint in her eye and a gorgeous laugh. And by then already dementia had started attacking her brain; in fact, it had been eating away at her receptors for 8 years by then. And you wouldn't know. Or maybe the signs were there, but we didn't know it. We've learned a lot more about the disease since then so now we know what to look for. But back then, we didn't see it. A couple of years later, my partner and I got married. And it wasn't until our daughter was born that we really started to notice a change. We'd come to visit and my mother-in-law would offer to sleep in the same room as my daughter so I could get some much-needed sleep. We'd explain the ratio of formula to water. But she couldn't retain it. She would get panicked. So we wrote it down. And then she'd ask us again. She was always nervous of doing something to upset somebody. I know now that anxiety is one of the symptoms in someone with dementia, but because she was an anxious person by nature, it was difficult to pick up on those clues. And then at some point she developed a tic of sorts where she constantly licked her lips. It drove us all mad! And then she started fidgeting with her hands and holding her thumb in. Again, this was such a small thing that even now I don't know if it started or was always there or was there occasionally but gained in intensity as the disease progressed. Then bigger things started happening: she would fumble with putting her seatbelt on and she started stumbling more; once she walked into the road without looking for traffic. That's when my partner and I knew something wasn't right. But it took a long time for the rest of the family to catch up. And to be fair, we still weren't sure ourselves if these were the early warning signs of dementia or if this was just ageing. It didn't take long for the signs to become more clear. We moved in my husband's parent's house for six months. My mother-in-law was always an early riser: she was, without fail, the first one up. The routine was for her to come down, turn off the alarm (which, in hindsight, she was always anxious and fastidious about turning on at night), run the tap, make a cup of tea, and head back up to bed to drink her tea in bed. One morning we were woken to the house alarm going off. We shrugged it off. Then it happened again. And again. Until they stopped setting the alarm. And I think it was then that we really knew she had dementia. By then she was 70. She wouldn't get an official diagnosis for another two years. By then the decline was much more steep. As I write this a thought I've had many times before resurfaces: the philosophical question of the point at which a few items become a pile? Or at what point do we name baldness? If I were to drop, say, a marshmallow on the floor. There would be one marshmallow. And if I dropped another there would be two marshmallows on the floor. And so on. But how many does it take for them to form a pile? Is it when 9 hit the floor? 10? And the same with baldness: if you lose a few hairs, it's just that. You've lost a few hairs. And then you lose a few more but you still have what would be considered a full head of hair. But at what point of loss until you're considered to be bald? The point of the comparison is that the changes are almost imperceptible. Like the changes in dementia. And that again makes me think of that shrinking brain. Blood flow is restricted causing that gray matter to shrink. But only a little bit. And for some with dementia the synapses are truncated, which is fine for a little while because we have an incredible number of them to keep our brains functioning. But how many synapses can be lost before it affects brain function? How long before it starts to eat away at our memories? I've read somewhere along the line that for those in the later stages of dementia, they might not be able to understand the context of what is being said but they can read the emotion of the situation. They might no longer know you are their daughter-in-law, but they recognise your smile and your warm embrace. They know they like your company. And so I guess what I take away from that is to love your loved ones. Because they might not recognise your face, but they can't mistake your love. |
AuthorThese are my thoughts and observations about dementia and my project on the subject as it evolves. Archives
May 2022
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