Today, I was sent a poem written by someone who has recently lost their mother to Alzheimers. She had identified that my Trace Dance series – showing what remains after someone leaves – related to her experience of the loss of self with the disease. I won’t publish the whole piece here but there were a few notions which hit home to me, and are worth holding, and thinking about for future works. When I was writing, it was mainly about connections being made and the work being open to project stories onto. This kind of flips it on its head – the connections are lost, but the partial fragments remain. Thanks for these A…

Faint reminders of what they were- a noise, a smile,a smell

The red and white lines you see in a photo of traffic at night, when the cars are invisible

Do you remember waiting for a baby’s first smile at 4 months?

Nobody tells you it’s almost the last thing left when a person is slowly disappearing under your gaze.

…the residents are “trace dancers”

This lady busily sweeps up crumbs, as she always did

That lady still puts on lipstick

Faint traces of their “before dementia” lives

What traces will I leave behind?

Photograph by Alex Ten Napel

http://stealmag.com/culture/152319.html

Trace Dance 1.7 (3) (2014) Acrylic on Canvas