Untitled Mom Project
In February 2020, I was bored and restless. I felt like focusing on something different, so I took some creative writing courses.
Then I realized a pandemic is a great time in which to learn and write. Who knew? I continued taking these courses, and now I have one last section to complete: To get the certificate, I have to write a 25K word manuscript that will be taken through a formal review process.
I will write about my mother and her dementia. But more so, this body of work will be about relationships, memories, caregiving, and preserving what's being lost. Its format will be more or less a collage made up of photographs – old and new, illustrations, comics, and stories. And although it will focus on the disease that affects more than 500,000 Canadians and 55 million people worldwide (these numbers are expected to double in the next decade), it will also tell this story in a very fragmented way through various mediums. It will be presented in a way similar to how the disease itself manifests.
 One of these mediums will be vignette comics – not told factually, but rather the opposite. These will be fictionalized accounts spun from photographs. Because who is to say to me that it didn't happen the way I imagine it did?
Because my mother was always so sentimental and frequently talked of her past, I feel that I know these people in my mother's memories intimately.
 There's Pearl, whose photograph I've always been obsessed with. Pearl became the subject of some artwork more than a year ago when I illustrated the photo and then created a vignette of her and my mother on their way to a wedding. It was this little comic that sparked something, and it took the better part of a year to figure out what that was.
And then there is the rest of the cast of characters
- Cora, the senior lady my mother lived with in the late '60s. It's apparent in the photos that she had a wild sense of humour and perhaps helped to bring that out in my mother.
- Mike, who my mother was engaged to before she met my dad. He was a ginger "who had the greatest laugh."
- Gerry, my mother's sister and best friend. She was always fashionable and revered by my mother. She died in 1984, and her loss has always been palpable.
Cora in all her glory.
And there are so many others I'd like to bring out with these vignettes. I have only a small sense of who they were, but I'm compelled to know more about them through this project. And even though these vignettes are meant to be fictional, much can be gleaned from the photographs they are inspired by, which will ironically purport the truth in a way
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