Dementia

Dementia

My mother, a brilliant multi-talented artist, started losing her memory several years after the passing of her beloved mother, my grandmother, and shortly after her abusive husband retired from his job as a high school vice-principal. He would leave her alone for weeks at a time while he gallivanted around the country rock-hounding with his girlfriend, and provided only cursorily for her basic needs (in one case hiring to cook her meals a woman with a criminal record who proceeded to bring her boyfriend into my mother’s house to pick her pockets and her locks). I had to hire a lawyer to force him to let my mother go into a nursing home, where she spent the last five years of her life. It was a good facility as these places go, though I was not happy with her treatment much of the time and spent a lot of energy advocating and outright fighting for her to get adequate care there. Witnessing the relentless deterioration which accompanies dementia of any kind is terrifying. But it was the dullness of her eyes-those former bright stars now reduced to black holes-that I think pained me the most. Amazingly, she recognized me until the day before she died, on June 6, 2002. This painting is a curse against the tentacles in her brain that ate her away piece by heart-rending piece.