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.