My Sanity is Ephemeral
The dog wasn’t desexed, she jumped the fence
It’s a hydrangea, that one is agapanthus.
My shoes were broken, so my father walked me down
We took the train, through Europe, fruit picking in Greece
The cat wasn’t desexed, she ran away
Leather boots that never wore out
We drove a car through Europe, Spain
It’s a hydrangea, that one is an agapanthus.
Smoking is one of the highest risk factors for dementia. The smell of cigarettes line the veins of the home where my Oma tells me cyclical stories from her past.
Oma asks where my Opa is and we tell her that he is in the garden. My mum’s voice breaks. My Oma’s face cracks into a smile.
Today, Oma called me by my mum's name. In her eyes, I see a vision of myself, tracing my bloodline upstream until I reach my mother’s childhood years.
I am my mum. My mum is my aunt. In this room at St Andrews Old People’s Home, we exist only in a chrysalis of her past.
But the hydrangea remains a hydrangea. The agapanthus is still an agapanthus.
In the same year that Oma was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, one of Australia’s most famous street artists, Rone, created his first immersive art exhibition EMPTY in a deserted theatre in Fitzroy. Portraits of young women were painted directly onto the decaying building. Their flesh had been sold to developers before their birth and the building was demolished days after the exhibition closed. But for a week, people filled the liminal spaces of society, drawn to the ephemerality of the art. Of course, street art is also named graffiti, linguistically reframing the artform as delinquency and facilitating its erasure from public spaces.
It is commonly said that the beauty of graffiti is born from its ephemerality, justifying a loss otherwise senseless.
A quote from Rone states:
“Something in a fragile state always seems more beautiful because you realise that they might not be there tomorrow.”[1]
Rone doesn’t argue that transient objects are more beautiful but rather that they seem more beautiful, linking transience and beauty in perception rather than quality. Rone relates this appreciation of fragility to the reason we visit our grandparents more than our aunties.
However, when deciding to switch off the life support for a grandmother than an auntie, we tend to have a lighter conscience. Our lives, in birth, in death, in sickness, quite literally lie in the hands of others, becoming dependent on our recognition as valuable. As Judith Butler writes: “to be a body to be exposed to social crafting and that is what makes the body a social ontology.”[2]
Life circles back to the idea of perception and its interpolation into reality. The grief we feel for someone is framed by the anticipated impermanence of their life, the predictability of their death.
For a long time, people thought Alzheimer's, a disease which causes memory loss and severe cognitive decline, was a symptom of aging. For an old person, a mind’s wandering into abstraction was considered normal.
There is a certain tone in which people will speak to old people who are physically or mentally compromised. Hands on knees. A plaster smile. “How are we today?” follows. And that “we” is so damning, veiling an individual in the collective imagining of age, a space in which anything can happen. Grief is lessened because at least they were long-lived; at least.
At a funeral of a friend, I remember the imam saying, “everyone dies. Sometimes we die when we are seventy, sometimes when we are young”. At the time, I kept waiting for his speech to dissolve the viscous grief that my body was coated in. Later, when I was surrounded by good-willed people searching for patterns of meaning I would receive the;
at least life was so bright
at least it gets better in time
at least there are so many good memories
at least.
Then, I understood the imam’s speech.
There is an age at which we cease to dream for the future of another because we consider the realistic potential of their aspiration to be less. Dreams, therefore, exist in a hierarchy. At twenty-one, my dreams are recognised as more achievable than they were at eight and more important than they will be at thirty when their value is eroded with age. And when we lose our minds and dreams and reality become inseparable, socially, the meaning of a person is abstracted.
Before he moved to the retirement home, my Opa was concerned that he was the victim of theft. His neighbours had stolen the addresses out of his address book.
In the Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath writes, "To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream". [3] I laughed at the absurdity of Opa’s fear.
Genetics is linked to Alzheimer's. It’s possible that at the very point of life when my hands have filled with memories, I will find the walls of my mind too eroded to keep them in.
My Opa walks out onto the front steps, tells me my painting is beautiful
It’s an agapantha, that one is a hydrangea
Got lost in the Sydney tunnels. Again
My Opa walks out onto the front steps, tells me my art is crap
Navigated through M4 using advanced google map reading
It’s an agapantha, that one is a hydrangea.
[1] A Multi-Disciplinary Artist Who Isn’t Easily Categorised, The New York Times Style Magazine: Australia, August 10, 2023. https://taustralia.com.au/t-australia-faces-rone/
[2] Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009, p.7
[3] Plath, Sylvia. 2005. Originally published 1963. The Bell Jar. London, England: Faber & Faber, p.259