The Art of Losing

It was a trip my grandfather had made thousands of times. He followed the long dirt driveway through a tunnel of trees, by the old granite quarry and down the hill to the convenient store for cigarettes and lottery tickets. On that return trip, and on that same street he had lived for more than forty years, he pulled to the side of the road unable to recognize where he was going.

Immediately following my grandfather’s dementia diagnosis, my family prepared a twenty-four hour care schedule, relocated his bedroom from the sagging addition supported by tree trunks to a room which required no stairs, and utilized the adjacent room for family who took the night shift. Every Wednesday I would stay, sleeping with one eye open atop an old bare mattress on the floor, Patsy Cline’s voice warming the house until dawn. Bells tied around door knobs in case he snuck out.

I have always known my grandfather to be sentimental, but growing up we never saw much of him. He slept days and stayed up nights for as long as I could remember, tending the wood stoves through the long New England winters. The police scanner popped and hissed in monotonic canticles every night. He was for decades the family documentarian, packing dozens of self-adhesive albums. Photos of the long dirt driveway white with snow, every picture of every flower my grandmother took, hunting trips and hanging deer, the holidays. He scribbled in old cursive the names and dates beside each photo, often inserting comical remarks about who he couldn’t remember or what was happening. 

His tendency to archive went beyond the familial sentimental. He recorded from vinyl and 8-track to cassette hundreds of music albums. He wouldn’t just record them once, he would also label on the vinyl sleeve the date which he recorded, and in some cases years later, recorded again. He would report on scraps of paper the winning and losing Red Sox scores in handwriting so small he could fit an entire season's games. Long before I was born he did a short stint in jail where he scrawled into a journal the lyrics to every single Hank Williams song on the radio.

It was on those Wednesdays that I started to explore the ways my grandfather's dementia diagnosis affected him and my family. I was interested in the way cognition fails, when memories become reorganized or forgotten altogether and a person has no reference for the recognizable, and fascinated by the extensive records he kept over the years. Though it wasn’t only my grandfather who was losing, but my family who was losing my grandfather.

There is no preparation for sudden loss, it strikes without warning and we’re often left to seek answers, to work backward until we make sense of a person's life and death. With dementia, my grandfather was the one who worked backward while my family was forced to arrange for a future without him. Though his getting lost on the old quarry hill was, in a sense, a sudden loss. A loss which he had been anticipating for many years. He had arranged himself within a cocoon of artifacts, preparing for the slow degradation and eventual metamorphosis from his mortal existence. Ephemera papered walls floor to ceiling tacked with photographs, newspaper clippings, and notes on calendars. Calendars from ‘49 and ‘77 and one from December ‘04 with a hand scribbled comment on the 13th, “the day I lost my best friend”, referring to my grandmother’s passing. Dispatches which assumed not only an artform, but an art he surrounded himself with. The art of losing.