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Having a parent with Alzheimer’s is kind of the opposite of having a child. With children, you expect that they will make mistakes, but you also expect that they will learn from them. Alzheimer’s goes the other way; behaviors that you expect stop and they are replaced with what can only be described as oddities.

It’s easy to react, in such situations, impatiently. Perhaps real parents, who have built up a store of equanimity after years of raising kids, might respond in a much more sanguine manner than someone who has never had to go through that experience. It isn’t fair, though, to be angry at a person who doesn’t understand what they are doing to upset you, especially when you know that it would never be in their character to do so.

As Pop began to decline, and I mean really decline, I found that I was spending more time being, if not angry, at least frustrated when I came across these peccadilloes. He was still, in many ways, self-sufficient. He could dress himself and get around by walking. He had his routes and his routine so that he was still ok to be at home by himself during the day. And thank heaven for the many wonderful neighbors who kept an eye out for him; he had an external support group that not only monitored, but truly loved him as well.

The first time you pull a bowl out of the cupboard and cereal covers the counter and the floor is annoying. It is a new and unexpected trick from someone that you expect to know better. The proof is there, in decades of living with him, Pop had never once done this. Luckily, Pop wasn’t around at the time, or I might have lashed out unkindly. Instead I cleaned up the mess and thought about what was going on.

Vascular dementia was an old diagnosis, Alzheimer’s was a new one at the time. This may be the first and only time that this is ever said, but perhaps the diagnosis was a blessing in disguise. Dementia, at least the symptoms that Pop showed from it, was characterized by a cognitive drop and then a period of stable mental state. At first, it was the same story, over and over, but that was about it. You got used to it after a while and, since you knew it was coming, you just learned to roll with it. 

Alzheimer’s, whether it was just a progression of the dementia, or whether it was a whole new thing, came with an ever changing set of bizarre actions. One day it was cereal in the fridge, complete with milk, the next it was a bag full of candy and a stack of gas station loyalty cards. Some of them were peculiar, sometimes they could be maddening, if you weren’t prepared.

At this particular juncture, I found myself constantly frustrated. Why are there used Kleenexes all over, why is there no toilet paper… Oh it’s in his room, he’s using it as Kleenex. The cereal from the cupboard just happened to be the incident that let me change my way of thinking.  I knew, and this wasn’t a deep down kind of feeling it was right on the surface, that Pop was not going to get better. There was no doubt that, while he once knew how to put the cereal away, or to fix more than just a peanut butter sandwich, there were things he was no longer going to do the way he had always done. As I swept up the cereal, I had to ask the question, “What can I do to not be angry with Pop?” The feelings were all mine and he couldn’t be held responsible for my temper.  I don’t get angry with a child when they accidentally spill a drink; in that situation you clean up and move on, or help the kid clean up. However you chose to handle it, getting angry isn’t the right way to handle a genuine accident. Yet, here I was angry as, in some ways, Pop was being very childlike.

The answer wouldn’t have been obvious but in light of the new diagnosis it gave me the strategy that I used to respond to the daily changes. I would just say, “Ah, Alzheimer’s,” and clean up, and move on.

A crash at 3:30 in the morning was an immediate cause for alarm. Pop was 87 years old and falling was just one of a number of concerns. He was lying on the floor at the foot of his bed but he was awake and didn’t seem to be in pain. That was a good sign.

“My leg isn’t working right.”

Honestly, my foremost concern was that he was having a stroke, not that he had just broken his hip. An x-ray at the hospital confirmed that the femur had fractured. His self-reported 4 out of 10 on the pain scale was a testament of just how tough Pop was.

Pop had dementia and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years ago. Despite Pop being a fighter, the doctor gave a grim prognosis. He told us he had never seen someone with dementia last more than a year after hip replacement surgery. It gave us a timeline; that was something.

It should have been obvious, but perhaps I didn’t want to know, that Pop wasn’t going to ever come home. Having been his primary caregiver for a couple of years, even though in the past year several family members had increasingly stepped in to help out as Pop needed more help, it was hard to not feel like a failure. I don’t know how most people feel when they have to make the decision to put a loved one in the care of others. If I had the opportunity, I might travel back in time and ask Mom and Pop how they felt when they had to put Grandpa in a home. For me it was a crushing feeling that I was incapable of taking care of Pop any longer. And, I wondered, and maybe I still wonder, how good of care I had given him.

Over the next few months I began going through the house and encountered a strange phenomenon. There were prescription bottles filled with change. There wasn’t just one or two of them either. I found dozens. By the time I had finished I found around 60 bottles and about $300 in change. 

As December rolled around I was thinking of a new project to work on. Every couple of years I like to take on a photography project to work on for the year. Sometimes I have a good idea of what the project will be, but usually it’s a notion and a naive jump into something that turns out to be more effort than I expected. What I knew is that pill bottles and spare change were part of the project, whatever that was, and I planned to start in January.

Even though we had an approximate timeline (less than 1 year) for how long Pop would still be with us, I expected that it would be near the end of that timeline or, and perhaps this is an indication of just how clueless I can be at times, that Pop would beat the doctor’s experience. So I started at the beginning of the year. At first it was disjointed and random as I was trying to come up with the details of this project I was starting. I had the raw materials, and I had this goal of donating something to an Alzheimer’s organization when I was done. That was it.

The idea of painting them to look like animals came in the second or third week of January and I thought I was on the way. And then the unexpected happened. Pop died. 

My brain told me that I could just go on with the project. I knew I was going to miss Pop. At the risk of sounding calloused, I wasn’t sad to see him go. The last couple of days he was on hospice care and was unresponsive in bed. Pop had lived a full life and he had never been the same since mom passed 16 years earlier. He was back with his sweetheart and a fully functioning mind, how could I begrudge him that. The reality was, that grief affects us all and sometimes in unexpected ways. The short of it was that the project I had started was just too much to tackle at the time, and while I worked on the animals over the course of the year, I just didn’t have the drive to turn it into an actual project, just pieces. 

In the end I decided to take a mulligan on 2022 and try again in 2023. It would seem like by now the project would be fully formed and clear, but once again I’m winging it. 

The first animal I made was Aethelbert the penguin. He’s been around for almost a year now, and I did try to make a final picture with him last year, but since I’m starting over, that included the need for a new Aethelbert picture. The beginning of The Change of Mind Project (revision 2) starts with this.

Sometimes things don’t go as planned. I took some images that I liked this week, but I felt like showing some of the images that didn’t make the cut.

Here I was gathering some ideas and getting ready to take some pictures. At this point I had some vague ideas about what I was going to shoot, but was still working through the process.

Nacho, the parrot, had a small accident. Stanley and Ivar (the shark and the octopus) were understandably freaked out, realizing just how dangerous the job they had signed up for could be. Nacho is currently in shock at the loss of a limb.

Stanley was right to be afraid, as just moments later, he took a bit of a tumble himself. No one was injured in this incident, but the cameraman was a bit unsteady as he was trying to take a picture and rescue a falling shark simultaneously.

This one isn’t a blooper, but I thought I should include a rose photograph this week just to show some progress on the 52 Roses front.

Hopefully, in the next week or two, I will be able to do some catch up and post a few more photos. Until then, enjoy.

It has taken a few weeks to start getting back into things. Aethbert the penguin is the first of my creations to go into this project. I finally had an idea of what to do with the prescription bottles that I emptied of change. His friends will be showing up as the year progresses and maybe I will do something special with them as the year draws to a close. There’s no telling what will be next.

Inertia had me stalled for a month or so, but once you overcome the stagnation and start moving then you build momentum. It’s still a bit difficult to get into things some days. Truth be told, I never thought I would have a blog. If you have a blog and no one reads it, does it really count?

Pop used to have this duck keychain. If you pressed on a button on the side, an LED in its mouth would illuminate and it made a quacking sound. He used to amuse children with it. Maybe I should have started with a duck instead of a penguin, but for some reason, maybe the fact that it’s the tail end of winter, I went with a penguin. It’s funny the associations you make with things. Not funny – ha ha – but interesting what things remind you of people or places.

I added another rose, for pop. The rose bushes are covered with snow and need a good trimming right now, but I see them almost every day. I remember the time that pop didn’t have clippers and bit the rose off the bush to give to someone passing by. And I remember all the times he left them in his pockets. He did that with chocolate too. Fortunately it was usually still in the candy wrapper or that would have made quite the mess.

I’m starting to consistently work on this now, though and even though I feel a bit behind I’m starting to make forward progress again. Sometimes that just what we need.

I started this project, with the expectation that my father might not be around at the end of it. Is it common to think that we have more time than we ever really do? As I sat down to work on some more pictures and get into the project some more, the phone rang and instead of taking pictures I instead, went to see my pop. It was the last time I got to be with him while he was alive.

It has been over a month since then and this project is still important to me, maybe now more than before. Behind the scenes I have been working on some things, taking pictures, crafting some characters for what this seems to be turning into, and doing some thinking on what my next steps are. But somehow sitting down at the computer to post some pictures and write a few words has just been difficult. Even now, I want to put it off until tomorrow, knowing full well that tomorrow will come with another reason to push it a day.

Today just seems like a good day to start again though. Before March begins seems like the right time to get back on some sort of schedule. Pop used to give roses to anyone walking by the house. Actually, he gave them to people he met on his walking route as well. I found more than one rose in the laundry that I missed taking out of his pocket when I ran a load. While it was a bit frustrating to clean flower petals out of the washer, it is hard to be angry at what was a potential kind act.

So today, I’m just posting some rose photos. I’ll get around to some different pictures shortly. It has taken some time but now I’m getting back to some sort of equilibrium, where I can move forward with this work.

This project didn’t go as expected. To be honest, motivation died somewhere in February 2021. It was a bad year for creativity for me. But I did take a few pictures that I just never posted, so I decided to put them up and say goodbye to this year and this project.

In 2022 I have a different project I’m going go be working on, so I’m hoping for a better year than 2021.

I started today with a small box of broken glass. There were some pieces that were different colors, small pieces, large pieces and a few other things. And I had no idea what to do with any of them.

Fortunately, a friend gave me the idea to do something with hearts. I’m sure that there is a better way to cut glass than what I did, but I liked the jagged edges that came from breaking the glass up. Unfortunately, glass is really brittle so even though it is hard, when it decides to crack, you end up with a broken heart instead of just a heart of glass.

A little super glue would have put it back into its original shape, although the crack where it had broken would have been visible in the picture. Instead of pretending that a once broken heart was completely ok after gluing it back together, I decided to leave it broken for the picture. I guess it was just too soon to pretend.

With a few broken ski parts and a little spray paint I came up with this picture. Sometimes it is hard to come up with a new idea, the same patterns keep coming up as you search for ideas. I poured paint over the binding but that seemed too much like what I had done for the first picture. I thought of different backgrounds and that just seemed too much like what I had done before as well.

The picture above didn’t exactly use wholly original ideas. I did use paint and I did use a backdrop, but I decided to try a more minimal approach where I focussed on a monochromatic theme with the contrast coming from only shadows.

This picture started out as a few cardboard tubes that I picked up from the local fabric store. But what is there, really, to do with them. As any reasonable person would do I looked at them this way and that and then stacked them in the corner because that didn’t immediately help at all.

A few days later I picked them up again, looked at them this way and that, and even peered through them like telescopes. Perhaps looking through a cardboard tube opens up a whole new world if you are a child and can see through the other end using your imagination, but looking James Bond opening style through a tube doesn’t do much when viewed through the lens of a camera.

As a rational thinking being might, I set the tubes aside again and looked for other ideas. Since none came to me, I took some LED lights and put them in the tube, which I promptly set aside one more time while I cut up and painted the other tubes. I glued those tubes together to make some abstract looking piece which I photographed. Then I turned on the lights and took a picture of the inside of the last tube. It turns out I actually liked that tube with lights picture so I played with it, changing the focal point until I got the picture above.

I have been meaning to post this picture for a couple of weeks. It needed some editing, and I don’t relish editing photos. As a result, I have procrastinated, I’m good at that. Today, however, I decided the time to procrastinate was over and so I did a quick and dirty edit and posted this picture.

I got the books from Marissa’s, a local used book store located in what used to be a service station. It is a unique location and my new favorite bookstore. If one of the books had been Fahrenheit 451, the picture would have been decided. Since that wasn’t among the ruined book, I had to come up with a different idea. Some of the books were illustrated and I had the idea of the pages flying out of the book.

With a little tape, some wire and a bit of added mood lighting, I created the picture above.