Brunch, 2024, oil on canvas, 40×30in
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Dementia creates a strange new sense of memory. It erodes the fabric of recollection, revealing how the mind hangs onto some memories more securely than others and without a lot of logic behind its selection. Like bony landmarks protruding from the overgrowth of a life no longer regenerating, fixed memories are rewoven with the confusion and muddling of past events to form new truths. Fiction moves in and stands firm that it is non-fiction. On bad days, it cannot be convinced otherwise. On good days, it recites memorized answers in an effort to convince us that everything is fine. To see this ruin of memory protruding from the sands is proof enough that it existed like this long before the problem was even a problem. The fixation on what was is persistent. The person we once knew still in there, somewhere, returning in glimmers like fireflies in the grass or a film reel with cells omitted.
The disease is a dream stuck on repeat—we never make it to the bus stop, the bags can never be packed, the crucial item never located, time always slipping away in a never-ending predicament. We try to run, but we are in quicksand. We try to fly but never get more than a few inches off the ground. We want to swim but there are shadows moving around deep below. In dementia, the mind dies first while the body remains able—a permanent and devastating disconnection of flesh and spirit.
What is the purpose of memory if it can let us down in such big ways? How does memory shape our perception of ourselves? Consciously or subconsciously I have altered, even omitted certain memories to adapt and survive—scraping out past impressions of my personal history and going over them with new layers of wisdom, regret, acceptance, and resolution. True memory loss is much different. It is a prime example of the persistence of human nature to hang onto the familiar against the current of inevitable aging.
In the years following my father’s death, my stepmother genuinely tried to move past the loss of her husband and life partner. She was scared, at times floundering, but she was putting in obvious effort to build a new life and make it work. Still in its infancy, her new normal was swiftly choked out by the shutdown and anti-social guidelines of the pandemic. Despite being a strong and often stubborn woman, even she cracked under the pressure. In isolation her memory began to fracture in tiny hairline ways. Her disease was almost undetectable at first but ever-growing, getting closer, accelerating. Silent yet progressing. As many of us would and do, she tried to hide her condition. She looked over shoulder to see and understand what was headed her way, but it was at best a momentary glimpse into a future from which she will never recover.