STICKY
My grandmother and I used to spend hours poring over family images. I was desperate to know her stories. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, sifting through family images became something new each time. I tried to start understanding how she saw and interacting with the images I knew we had spent time laughing over for years. I wanted to understand how she remembers.
Each day, after gauging her emotions, I sat with my yiayia, brought out a stack of old family pictures and that day’s colored sticky note. I would place a picture in front of her and ask if she could help me figure out who is in the picture and write anything she remembered about the image on the sticky note. I worked through the same forty images, repeating them in cycles. Each image was seen by her between two and four times.
I wanted to begin to understand how one relates to their identity when the memories attached to it begins to waver. I wanted to understand how my grandmother’s relationship to favorite stack of images she used to reminisce over was beginning to change.
Each sticky note color below corresponds with the “session” number and day the caption was written.
Example: Session 1 through the established stack of images were written on a purple sticky.
Each purple post-it was captioned on the same day.
Her captions often depended on her mood. Some days we only got through 10 with every image she looked visibly flustered or insisted she ask my grandfather for help. Some days she flew through 30 with no help at all.
This didn’t change the accuracy of her captions but her confidence and sureness allowed her to enjoy the moments we spent sifting through these old and increasingly unfamiliar memories.
Some days she was more self-conscious about her handwriting, others she added exclamation points for emphasis!
She often couldn’t recognize her own face, and many times believed it to be my mother (Stephanie) or sometimes me (Katie). When she saw her husband (Jerry) she could deduce it must be her in the picture with him. Her memory strategies began to become clearer, even if the name written down wasn’t accurate.
She needs to feel safe, have fun, and feel as though she is being seen. When those align, she is far less focused and flustered by the accuracy of the names. Instead, her confidence allows her to write her first thought without stress and enjoy the time spent sifting through old memories.