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The Perks of Being an Artist

Tag Archives: behavioral variant

Scotch

04 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, painting

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

addiction, Alzheimer's, appestat, art, artist, behavioral variant, booze, bourbon, dad, dementia, father, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, paint, painter, painting, scotch

Today, in continuation of the paintings about who my dad was before the dementia from the Fractured Memories series, we’re focusing on scotch. Wink. I may be a bourbon girl, but my dad was a scotch man. So is my mom. When they traveled, they brought the bottle along with them so they wouldn’t have to go hunting for good scotch at cocktail hour in a strange city. As mentioned in the last post in this series, my dad was an alcohol and drug abuse counselor in California, so was alert to the dangers of excess consumption. I don’t think I ever saw my dad drunk, but he had a cocktail right at 5pm pretty much every day of his adult life, a glass of wine with dinner, and sometimes a “nightcap” before bed. So I had a good idea of responsible alcohol consumption. In 2006, when my dad came down for one of my art shows, he drank more than what I considered normal for him, and asked a couple socially awkward questions of my friends. I thought it was weird, but didn’t think too much about it. Then on the next visit, he drank too much at dinner and was kind of tipsy. Normal for a lot of people, but not really for my dad. It bothered me a little, but not enough to say anything. Looking back now, I think that was an early sign of the dementia. Like his appestat (like the thermostat of your appetite – it’s the function of your brain that tells you when you’re full so you should stop eating), the part of his brain that would normally say, “Nick, you’ve had enough booze,” wasn’t working properly. Thus, the overconsumption of both food and alcohol (resulting in a ton of weightloss…well, not literally a ton, but still, he gained about 60 pounds). When my dad was finally diagnosed, he cut alcohol completely out for fear that it could be contributing to his symptoms and hasten his mental decline.

Anyway, I have good memories of the pre-dementia days and cocktail hour. If it was just my family, we’d sit and listen to NPR as whoever was cooking prepped dinner. If there were guests, there’d be hilarious conversations and upbeat jazz in the background. Thinking about it, I feel physically warmer. I remember lying on the sofa with my head in my mom or dad’s lap, and they’d play with my hair and I’d hear the clink of ice in the glass when they’d take a sip. Sometimes a little condensation would cause a drop of water to fall on my cheek, and I’d get a little shiver. The smell of scotch, even though I don’t like drinking it, brings me comfort, so I created a painting as part of the series of a close-up of a bottle of it.

Scotch 6

Scotch 6″x6″ oil on canvas

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Miss Piggy and Groucho Noses

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, painting

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alzheimer's, art, artist, behavioral variant, father, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, Groucho, Miss Piggy, paint, painting

Look! I remembered my promise from last Thursday!! That’s a minor miracle because my brain has completely and totally shut down this week in response to what I’m calling Crapfest ’15. Here are the next two paintings from the Fractured Memories series that I’m doing about my dad and dementia. The two snapshots of who my dad used to be that we’ll focus on today reflect my dad’s love of the ridiculous. He loved puns, dirty jokes, Monty Python/Beyond the Fringe, funny music, silly headwear, gag gifts, and above all, Miss Piggy. I get his love for the Muppets, because let’s be honest, they’re amazeballs. I want them to be my friends, mostly because they would fit in with the friends I already have so well. But if you even showed my dad a picture of Miss Piggy, he’d start laughing. He just loved her. So to give the world a little snippet of who my dad was, I’m including these two paintings in the series:

Miss Piggy 6"x6" oil on canvas

Miss Piggy 6″x6″ oil on canvas

Groucho Nose 6"x6" oil on canvas

Groucho Nose 6″x6″ oil on canvas

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Compulsions

18 Wednesday Mar 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, painting

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alzheimer's, art, artist, behavioral variant, dementia, father, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, Nick Page, painting

I really wish I had had my dad around yesterday. Not because I was missing him as him so much, but because one of the manifestations of his dementia in the earlier stages was a compulsive need to pick up trash on the side of the road by our rural home. I spent a portion of yesterday picking up all the crap that people toss out their windows as they pass the haunt property and was really wishing that I had someone to do it who actually wanted to do it. He would have been so satisfied afterward.

He developed a lot of compulsive behavior in the mid to early stages of the disease. Picking up trash beside the road, taking trash and recycling to the dump, killing the stink bugs and lady bugs that were aiming for world domination (or at least domination of our home), cleaning things in general, grooming, and eating (the eating resulted him gaining an elephant’s worth of weight). When we put him into the dementia car facility, he picked up a couple new ones, like signing his name repeatedly because the activities director had had them practicing it one time. We have pages and pages of his signature. He’d fill the page, then put boxes around the signatures. He had also had a full beard and mustache for as long as my mom and I had known him. We’d never seen him without it. Then one day, he grabbed his roommate’s electric razor and compulsively shaved it all off. I walked in and looked around for him and didn’t even recognize him. When I realized the heavyset, clean shaven man in the chair was my father, I started to cry. It was so heartbreaking to not even recognize my dad. It was like a physical manifestation of all the ways he was mentally and emotionally becoming unrecognizable. He shaved a couple more times and then we were able to keep the razor hidden and he grew the beard and mustache back.

This painting from the Fractured Memories series, called Compulsions, is of him when he shaved, and I transferred a page of his signatures onto the background canvas.

Compulsions, 12

Compulsions, 12″ x 12″, mixed media

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The Shadow of Your Smile

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, music, painting

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Tags

Alzheimer's, art, behavioral variant, father, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, paint, painting

18

18″ x 24″ mixed media

Another piece from the Fractured Memories series about my dad and dementia, the music in the background is “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Lyrics are as follows

The shadow of your smile

When you are gone

Will color all my dreams

And light the dawn

Look into my eyes my love and see

All the lovely things you are to me

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Light as a Lily Pad

26 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, music, painting

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Tags

Alzheimer's, art, artist, behavioral variant, dementia, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, paint, painting

Light As a Lily Pad_compressed

30″ x 30″ mixed media on canvas

Another painting from the Fractured Memories series I’m working on about my dad and dementia. The words are an excerpt from a poem my grandmother wrote about her grandmother. It reads, “In her ninety-fifth year as the shadows were gathering, her mind floated light as a lily pad on quiet pond.” I love that image. It makes that vacant look my dad gets seem somehow quieter, softer, and more beautiful.

The sheet music in the background is “Old Folks,” which is my favorite song on my dad’s cd.

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I Get Along Without You Very Well

19 Thursday Feb 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, painting

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Tags

art, artist, behavioral variant, dementia, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD

mixed media

24″ x 18″ mixed media

The third in the series here and here from the Fractured Memories series, this painting is the smallest because the world without my dad seems to have shrunk a little bit, and the parent elephant has wandered completely off the path. The baby elephant remains on the path but has stalled. The lyrics to the tune “I Get Along Without You Very Well” (composed by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics based on a poem by Jane Brown Thomson) are:

 

I get along without you very well

Of course, I do

Except when soft rains fall

And drip from leaves

Then I recall

The thrill of being sheltered in your arms

Of course, I do

But I get along without you very well

 

I’ve forgotten you just like I should

Of course, I have

Except to hear your name

Or someone’s laugh that is the same

But I’ve forgotten you just like I should

 

My mom and I are doing our best to carry one down the trail of life, but it’s hard not to feel kind of stuck right now. We’re doing fine, except when we’re not.

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The Best Is Yet To Come

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, family, Fractured Memories, health, painting

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alzheimer's, art, artist, behavioral variant, dad, dementia, father, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, painting

At my mom and dad’s gym, they had a wall of advertisements, and one of them was a picture of my dad doing yoga with the caption, “The best is yet to come.” When we moved my dad into the dementia unit and stopped taking him to yoga, my mom asked them to take it down because it made her too sad. The best for him has passed. The best for our relationships with him has passed.

Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be posting two related paintings from the Fractured Memories series. Note that the baby elephant in this painting is still sticking close and following behind the adult elephant. This represents our relationship before the dementia: still connected, with the path to our future opening up before us, Dad leading the way.

40

40″ x 30″ mixed media

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Fighting Dementia, One Show Tune at a Time

01 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by emilypageart in dementia, humor, music

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Alzheimer's, art, behavioral variant, dementia, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, music, show tunes, singing

Yes! I now have a valid reason for singing along with every musical we watch, and every musical we didn’t watch, and really, every musical that ever was. And S just has to sit there and take it, bwahahahahaaa!

Singing Show Tunes Fights Dementia

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I Cling

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by emilypageart in art, dementia, Fractured Memories, health, painting

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Alzheimer's, art, artist, behavioral variant, dementia, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, painting

So much of my mood for the week after I visit my dad at the end of each month depends on my last visit with him. If he was more tuned in, I have an easier time of it. If he was more distant and less alert, I struggle. I think I fear that something will happen and my last moments with him will have been unconnected ones. And so, with each visit, I cling and pull and try to twist his attention back to us. More often than not, these days, it doesn’t work. I hang on to those small moments that it does with all my might, terrified to let go and lose him again.

I don’t think the need for your parents’ love ever goes away, and I suspect that a lot of my clinging is my desperate wish that he could love me the way he used to. It’s selfish. I know he does love me on whatever level he is currently capable, but it just isn’t the same? I try every trick in the book – hurling songs he knows, family catch phrases, silly jokes he used to love – anything to get a look of recognition out of him. When I get an actual hug that feels real, or a genuine laugh? Fugghedaboudit. That dangling carrot keeps me coming back for more. At what point will I be able to let go of my need for him to recognize our relationship and instead just accept him as he is? Will I ever be able to stop trying to force him into it and accept that the disease is just too strong?

The text for the painting from the Fractured Memories series reads “I cling and I cling and I cling, but the disease chips away at him, turning him from me. How do you know when it’s time to let go?”

3

3″ x 9″ mixed media

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Dementia Care 101

27 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by emilypageart in dementia, family, health

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Alzheimer's, behavioral variant, dementia, dementia unit, dementia ward, FLD, frontal lobe dementia, frontotemporal dementia, FTD, memory care, memory care facility

The decision to put your loved one with dementia into a dementia care facility is agonizing. I’ll talk in another post about how we came to that decision. But for now, I just want to remind people that, even though you’re most likely paying more than you can afford for people to give your loved one top notch care, you need to be double checking that it’s actually happening. Even with my mom visiting my dad several times a week, things get overlooked. She assumes that the people who are paid to care for him are caring for him. Go figure. When I was home for Christmas, I noticed that his fingernails were long and really jagged where he’d bitten pieces off, so I filed them down. His skin is really dry with all this cold weather, and my mom has provided multiple bottles of lotion for the staff to slather up his stomach and back because he gets really itchy. I think  they’ve mostly been good about that, but no one has been trimming his nails on any kind of regular basis, and it definitely hasn’t been done since I was there for Christmas. As a result, he has scratched himself raw and drawn blood. I teared up when he lifted his shirt to itch and I caught a glimpse of the bright red cross hatching marking up his stomach. I took a photo, but I will spare you from having to look at it. Mom asked someone a week ago to make sure that his nails got trimmed, and as of yesterday, it hadn’t been done, so we did it ourselves again. We are paying obscene amounts of money, and are really disappointed that this basic care has not been provided. I ended up going in today to talk to the higher-ups and the nurse in charge about this and a couple other things, like making sure there’s soap in the wall mounted dispenser in his bathroom, and making sure there’s always a staff member around in the main living area to keep an eye on the residents who aren’t participating in activities. They seem chronically understaffed.

For the most part, his care is good, but on several instances, we’ve basically had to shame them into basic things like changing him out of his pj’s in the morning and into regular clothes. We’ve had to write letters, hang signs in his room explaining the difference between pajamas and not-pajamas, and talk to staff members reminding them of our expectations, which I don’t think are unreasonable. We’re not asking them to weight on him hand and foot (although, honestly, for what we pay, they should be), but they are always reactive to the issues that pop up (and usually only because we’ve had to speak up about it) and are very rarely proactive in preventing the issues in the first place. You would think Dad was their first dementia patient and they’ve never seen these things before.

So, if you have opted not to keep your loved one at home, check on them. Regularly. Even if the staff seem to really care. If they don’t live nearby, find someone who can check on them. Regularly. If you can’t do that, consider moving them closer. Even the best facilities can slack off if family members aren’t there to advocate for the residents.

All of that being said, I am pleased to report that he was having a good day yesterday, and was very smiley and happy to sing along, and tolerated his manicure admirably. He was definitely out of it Sunday and today, but I’m awfully glad for the giggles we got out of him on Monday. And I’m a sucker for his hugs and kisses. Those moments when he genuinely laughs are like rainbows stitching up my heart.

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Emily Page

Emily Page

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