My father’s dementia and becoming his main carer after my mother’s death had a major impact on me. Poetry has often been a way for me to cope with difficult things and this collection reflects that. But I also wanted to show dementia in a different way, to personalise and normalise it, and to show the gifts it brought as well as the devastation.
THIEF
Written in anger at all that Alzheimer’s took away from my dad, this was my first ever mixed media poem. The words are laid out in a spiral that reflects both the kawandi quilting technique I chose as well as the spiralling effect of the disease. Fabrics are deliberately chosen to reflect aspects of my dad’s life, e.g. astronomy and dogs, and the poem is framed by the ‘wings’ (corner pieces) made up of his favourite repeated sayings that now live on in younger generations. The edges are left deliberately to fray to echo the progress of the disease.
JIGSAW
I wanted to express something about the gaps in the brain, the connections that Alzheimer’s destroy, and a jigsaw seemed an obvious metaphor. Putting it together was much more painful than I expected and the poem that I wrote out of that expresses my longing to regain the father I remembered.
MANIFESTO
Please click the picture below for the full poem in PDF format.
I don’t remember where I first came across the idea of placing your own name (instead of ‘Love’) in the famous lines from 1 Corinthians 13. And I have always thought it important to remember that ‘love’ as a verb rather than a warm gooey feeling. So this whole chapter on how to love lends itself well to an adaptation considering how loving someone as a carer translates in real life.