No. 80 - The One Indiscriminate
A tale of mistaken identity
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I learned recently that although I had Covid way back in June, I could still be feeling its effects.
Oh.
I went to the physiotherapist for some aches and pains and he said that Covid could be the culprit, and that it took him a few months to get back to normal after he’d had it. He’s twenty years younger than I am.
Oh.
I learned that post-Covid, one friend’s depression worsened and another friend found themselves crying a lot for several weeks. I was made to understand that I was probably suffering from brain fog, and that this could explain why my attempts to work on pretty much anything were ending in frustration because I could not for the life of me gather my thoughts.
OH.
This explains a lot, haha. It’s been four and a half years since the pandemic started and I’d never had Covid, so I stopped Googling about it a long time ago. I really didn’t realize—but goddammit I wish I had—how long its effects might linger. I sure would’ve cut myself some slack back in June and July. Man, I was MESSED. UP.
I don’t know if I’m 100% recovered, but I do feel like I’m re-entering the world. Like I’m waking up. Like I’ve finally had a small fire lit under my ass.
HI!
What I’m endeavoring to do at the moment is find pockets of joy where I can, lean into the energy of trees, stay out of my head, and allow whatever’s coming next to present itself to me in its own sweet time. Wish me luck.
The following is something I wrote in 2018, a year and a half after my mother died of Lewy Body dementia. This writing and the paintings of my mother were probably the genesis of my Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir project, but I didn’t know that at the time.
The One Indiscriminate
My mother was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia in the fall of 2012. She lived at home (with in-home care) for the next two years, then spent the last two years of her life in a care home. This diagnosis was unprecedented in our family—my grandmother had a mind like a steel trap—so there was plenty of shock and awe on my part before the four years were over. I realize now that half the people in this town (if not more) have intimate knowledge of dementia and its particular rude surprises. These include both the traumatic emotional aspects of watching your family member disintegrate before your eyes, and negotiating the Kafkaesque medical "system" that can only be learned and mapped by dealing with each new crisis that comes your way. It's a voyage of horrifying discovery.
Lewy Body dementia differs from Alzheimer’s disease in that it involves hallucinations, certain characteristics of which are shared by the people who suffer from it. My mother saw people with cardboard faces and squarish features, wearing suits made of oatmeal or cottage cheese. Those were the adults, and they were larger than human size. The children were different— they would create their own bodies by stealing rungs from a chair to use as their legs, and maybe stealing someone’s sweater to make up their torso. They would also apparently steal food, money, and my mother’s house keys, as well as let the cat and dog out the back door when she wasn’t looking. My mother would also see faces coming out of the floor, or grass growing from her hand. She apparently had a three-day tryst with her doctor and his wife. At the care home she slept with "an eight-foot virgin" and regularly had children jumping from her window. To name but a few of the visions she shared with us.
Amazingly, my mother kept her sense of humour until very close to the end. Once, on leaving a musical performance she was attending at the care home, she shook her head and said to us, 'I had ONE indiscriminate in my life, and he was sitting right beside me!" I knew what she meant—she meant "indiscretion"—and she was referring to the elderly man seated beside her during the performance. When we reached her room, she was still shaking her head about it. "I've had sex ONCE in my life... and he had to be sitting right beside me!" My mother has two children, so my husband David felt it safe to say, "I think you've had sex more than once..."
She laughed. It was always sweet relief when she laughed.
It's been 15 months since my mother died, and I think I'm starting to relax. All told it was a five-year period of repeated stress, trauma, and sorrow. Painful and horrendous as it was, I see now I was privileged to experience it, and to be able to help my mother. Not that I want to go through it again anytime soon. And not that I welcomed it. But I can't regret it. That would be like regretting life.
To cap things off, here’s the last panel from the graphic memoir piece More! Tales of Dementia, that made up part of Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir. It seems a fitting punctuation to the paintings and writing above.
Some Stuff:
🪞A Room Alive! - a short documentary about Lynda Barry’s comics classroom at UW-Madison in Wisconsin
🪞Nick Cave does it again. His newsletter The Red Hand Files is worth every penny (and it’s free)
🪞My favourite photographer, Vivian Maier. I especially love her self-portraits
Previous posts you might like:
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🪞Buy my Collage Class—$40 CAD for a one-hour prerecorded download
🪞Listen to my interview with Sheryl MacKay on CBC’s NxNW here (starts ten minutes in). It’s all about Life’s Work: A Visual Memoir, an art exhibit about my mother’s Lewy Body dementia and my relationship with her
🪞Visit balampman.com
🪞There's always Instagram
Great work as always B.A. I'm glad you are beginning to recover. Even in a brain fog, you are still better than most.
Welcome back! :)