I’ve always had a really bad memory. So when my mother got Alzheimer’s disease, I knew that I had to record what was happening to her and to our family. I wanted to be able to look back over my notes and remember all the moments of craziness, beauty, and tragedy- and not lose any of them.
Mom started showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s in 1996, when she was only 52. Our family ran through all the possible explanations-job loss, depression, menopause-until finally we realized it must be something neurological. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1998. For the next six years my father cared for her, eventually with the help of hired caregivers. Mom’s sisters, Debbie and Sukey, and my sister Hannah and I helped as much as we could.
I lived in Vancouver and my parents lived in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I visited two or three times a year replica watches, and took notes and drew pictures the whole time I was there.
Eventually those notes and sketches became Tangles.
My mother and I in 1978 replica watches, at our rented farmhouse in Maine. This is how I thought of her before she got sick: powerful, protective, joyous.
My mother and I sometime around 2002, at her home in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She’s in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s, confused and scared. This disease is about so much more than losing your memory: it makes it hard to navigate space, to understand or trust the world around you.
My mother always had a very big heart, which was a mixed blessing for us kids when we were little – she’d befriend people we found difficult or embarrassing. But this was a key part of her that endured throughout her illness, this open-heartedness.
I first realized something was wrong with my mother in the summer of 1998, when I came to visit from Vancouver. There were lots of small strange things that added up to something seriously wrong.
My mother was very passionate about justice, and this endured even as she lost her ability to remember details and to communicate her thoughts. My father was often the only one who could figure out what she was trying to say, as they had so many years of shared conversations.
My parents were both intellectuals with a strong love and respect for language that they passed on to their children. As her illness progressed, my mother lost so much of her language – written, then spoken, then understood. Meanwhile, my father sometimes coped by zoning out. Napkins came in handy for recording bizarre exchanges like these that I never would have remembered otherwise.
My mother was obsessed with her cat, and this intensified as her illness progressed. Lucy was an aloof, somewhat skittish cat replica watches, but my mother felt very connected to her. In fact, she seemed to recognize her at times when she didn’t recognize me.
I kept a journal and sketchbook close by during my mother’s illness. These are the last pictures I drew of her, the night before she died. My aunt Sukey and I stayed with her at the nursing home that night.
Although I think about my mother every day, I rarely dream about her. This dream has stayed with me as a potent image of what my mother meant to me.
“Tangles”
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