Tag Archives: faith

A Train For Dad

05 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in art, death, dementia, family, gratitude, mental health, painting, sip and paint studio, tattooing, Uncategorized

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Today is the 2nd anniversary of my dad’s death. I still think about him every day. I still go through bouts of serious grief. I still picture those final, horrible, painful days with him as we sat by his bedside and watched him die. I still have nightmares. But, very slowly, I’m also starting to remember some small things from before his dementia, or at least in the very early phases of it. They’re not huge things, and there aren’t as many of those memories as I’d like compared to memories post-diagnosis. But they’re there.

I’m not going to lie and say that time has made this all easier to bear. It hasn’t. Life without my dad in it is lonelier. It’s a little less colorful. I feel less confident without him there to cheer me on. And I go through periods where the world seems bound and determined to remind me of him and make me cry. I want him back. Now. I want him to stop by and check on me, though I don’t even know if that’s possible. It’s hard not being a person of faith. Sometimes I think that his soul might be floating around out there, still tethered to mine somehow, like some big, transparent, elephant-shaped balloon. Other times that seems ridiculous. It feels like I’m looking for signs that aren’t really there. Or maybe they are.

In this time of transition in my life, I need him more desperately than ever to help confirm that I’m on the right path. Closing the paint and sip studio was hard, because it was a huge chapter of my life that he never got to see. And closing it reminds me of how many more chapters I’ll begin and end that he won’t be here to witness. But even if those chapters can’t be ours, they’ll still happen.

As we gear up to open the tattoo studio, I’m so sad that he’s not here to hug me and tell me how proud he is of me. I still need that paternal affirmation. So, I find myself doing little things to make him a part of things there. And that’s where this painting comes in. Long time readers know my dad was a huge train buff, so I created this painting for the tattoo studio lobby in hopes that I’ll feel like he’s taking part in this next phase of my life.

Steam Engine Wheels.JPG

Steam Engine Wheels 36″ x 46″ oil on canvas

Prints and other merchandise available here and here.

And in case you don’t already know: Know a caregiver, or someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone who knows someone else who’s a caregiver? Or heck, do you know a person? Well, you should tell them about my book, Fractured Memories: Because Demented People Need Love, Too. Part memoir and part coffee table art book, I recount my family’s heartbreaking and hilarious journey through my father’s dementia. Available to purchase here (this is my favorite way if you live in the U.S.), here or here if you’d rather get the eBook than a print copy, and here (especially if you want a hard cover copy).

Book cover 1

Mondays With Muddy

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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This is the next excerpt of my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“I’ve used the word ‘awareness’ over and over in this journal but with a growing dissatisfaction, partly beccause it has been overused and partly because more and more it seems to me too rational for what I mean. I’ve been trying to think of some analagous word that would pertain not only to the quickening of the mind and feelings but to the senses, the muscles, the whole body; a word that would cover everything from the most sensitive intuitiveness to the ‘knowingness’ that draws the salmon back to its natal waters to spawn, or causes a plant to turn toward the light. A word that would have its head in the stars and its feet on the ground. I wish I could find it.

Speaking of words, I’ve suddenly had a new insight into that word ‘obedience.’ I have always thought of it in terms of obeying the orders of some arbitrary authority, but we also speak of obeying certain principles. To state it in reverse, if you disobey the laws of harmony, you get discord. If you try to disobey the law of gravity by jumping off a high tower with the intention of remaining in mid-air, you fall and get killed. To think of obedience as bringing oneself into accord with natural, or supernatural, forces gives me a quite different feeling about it.”

 

Mondays With Muddy

12 Monday Dec 2016

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Here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Evening. It has been a strange day. I have not ventured beyond my own yard. If any friends had dropped in on my, they would have found me behaving normally and looking perfectly calm, I think. But inside I have been running furiously to escape the ‘unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace’ following me. Yet at the same time, I was hoping to be caught. There were even times when I turned around to run toward the Pursuer instead of from Him, having first been careful to set up several barriers between us. How ambivalent can one be?

I must have had some naive notion in the back of my head that the conflict was going to be resolved all in one day. If I could not longer keep God out of my life, then I suppose I looked for a sudden ovewhelming conversion or illumination or rebirth. All at once I would be filled with joy and peace and the love that passeth knowledge. I would become Saint Somebody, in short.

Now that the panic of my predicament has worn off, I can think a little more calmly and clearly. I am no longer running, either from or toward. I feel as if I wre beginning a long pilgrimage that will take years, perhaps the rest of my life. I shall very likely get lost many times, and stumble from weariness, and be tempted to turn back – and may well turn back unless I can find more courage and patience, more faith, hope and love than I’ve ever discerned in my character up to date.

There is an old saying that to undertake a journey of a thousand miles, on begins with a single step. Perhaps I took the fist step unwittingly when I was drawn back here. I’m not sure in what direction to take the second step. It is not a journey that can be planned out ahead of time with road maps and advance reservations at comfortable motels. It has, I think, to be moved out like a dance, which is neither an intellectual procedure nor a random miscellany of steps and gestures, but rather the evolvement of one movement out of and into another, all of them related by an underlying intent. It requires discipline and balance and devotion, and the stamina to endure periods of discouragement. Like the dane, moreover, it should never be undertaken in a spirit of plodding drudgery or dogged determination but with a basic bouyancy and trust and sometimes joy in spite of temporary defeats. And like making a dance, it requires constant awareness, the ‘listening attitude’ of Mrs. McCaig, if one is going to hear the music to which one dances.”