At that time, Mom's world was The World. She and Dad crossed oceans on jets and ships; they trained for 5K competitions; they got involved in the church and politics.
During a recent walk in the park outside of the memory care facility with Mom and her caregiver Laura, I took a photo that my phone app transformed into the painting below. I call it Mom's World after Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth's portrait of a disabled neighbor looking towards home. (I've known that painting 50 years and never had noticed the wheelchair in the distance.)
In the image, I see how Mom still wants to appear at her best. Laura helps her with lipstick, earrings, and painted nails. The waves in Mom's hair and the white stripes of that cute top go with the white waves laid in strips over the blue sky.
Mom's reserved smile shows amusement and judgment withheld. She laughs to hear that the staff refer to her as "the Queen." She walks when a physical therapist helps her to remember how, but she's ok now with her wheelchair.
The impressionistic scenery matches Mom's vague impression that her childhood home is in those hills. She doesn't remember what that place was (Cincinnati), but she likes to look through photos of places and people she used to know and to listen as we tell her about them.
We've made it past the years of frustration when her world was too big for her to manage -- when she placed calendars and clocks in every room and stuck memos on every surface to tell her what she thought she needed to remember.
For now, we're in a sweet spot, when the past is far off and she doesn't look beyond the frame of her present moment. What we see in this image is her world, just the right size.
[See more of Mom's story at my page Dementia Diary.]
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