Unconventional Art - Amanda Wong
Image used with permission from Club Member, Silver Club Programs, U-M Geriatrics Center All rights reserved.
Amanda Wong is a second-year MD/PhD student at the University of Michigan Medical School. This piece was written based on an interview generously granted by a member of a memory loss program. Amanda imagines herself as the son, a physician.
“What are you listening to there, Dad?” My dad was sitting at the kitchen table, with ear buds in his ears, fidgeting with some black, pocket-sized device that looked like an audio cassette player. I figured maybe he had dug up his Walkman, out of nostalgia, to listen to old tapes of his. He often used music to get him in the mood to do what he did these days to pass the time, which is what he had done, and made a career out of, his whole adult life – that is, making “unpopular art.” Those were his words. “I am a creator and purveyor of unpopular art,” he would declare.
With all of my dad’s talk about unconventional art, and his recurrent monologues on the importance of producing art that provides commentary on the social and political issues of the day, one could mistake him for being part of the generation that came of age during Woodstock and the Civil Rights movement. But the 60s and 70s were actually a time when he was working for a commercial art company, while I was growing up. These days, when reminiscing on my teenage years, I often feel, with a twinge of regret, that my dad was born a generation too soon, and that it should have been he rather than I to have been young during those times.
Still, Dad has no dearth of stories to tell from his own childhood. He was born in the year 1930, the year after the Great Depression had started. To this day he can relate with great clarity stories from his past – of the effect the death of his older brother had on him in his childhood; of his chance to visit the North Pole while he was stationed in Alaska during his service in the Korean war; and with the most vivid detail, of the day he met his wife, my mother, and the days they passed together until 18 months ago when she passed away. It’s just the more recent stuff, like what he had for breakfast this morning, or where he misplaced the iPod I got him for his last birthday, the short-term, trivial stuff, that recently has had a hard time sticking.
“I’m not listening to anything,” my dad answered grumpily, still playing with the device. “I haven’t been able to hear anything since my hearing aid got stolen.”
Oh no, I thought, he had lost something again. Next it was going to be his bifocals, and he’d be at his art deaf and blind. Truly unconventional. The contraption he was holding, then, must be some sort of replacement hearing aid. “Is that what you got to replace it then?” I asked, ignoring the fact for now that the hearing aid he lost was a $900 premium hearing aid that my wife, Barb, and I bought him after he had come back from the doctor six months ago saying that his doctor recommended that he get one.
“Yeah. My hearing aid was stolen,” my dad repeated. “Hearing aids are too damn expensive, so I went down to the Radio Shack and bought myself this piece of crap. It’s a Stereo Amplifier Listener. Got it for $26.99,” he said, with a mixture of pride and disgust.
Who would want to steal your hearing aid, was what I wanted to say. But not wanting to sound like I was accusing him of lying, I asked instead, “Are you sure you didn’t just misplace it somewhere? Have you looked around for it?”
“No, because it was stolen. It was Hilda.” Hilda was my dad’s home nurse aide.
“That doesn’t sound like something Hilda would do,” I responded. “Have you checked your bedroom?”
“Hilda’s a great gal and all, but hearing aids are expensive. Her parents are hard of hearing too.”
This took me a second to process. “So you’re saying Hilda stole your hearing aid so she could give it to her parents?”
“That’s right. Hilda stole my hearing aid, ‘cause her parents needed one. So now I’m stuck with this piece of crap.”
Which parent would Hilda end up giving it to, I thought to myself. She’d have to choose favorites between her mom and her dad. Maybe they’d share the stolen, prized hearing aid. But because he seemed content playing with his new Stereo Amplifier Listener, I left my dad alone.
Usually I tried to take Dad’s memory loss lightly, to view these incidents with bemusement, rather than concern, which was the approach my wife took. It was only after her urging, in fact, that I had asked my dad to move in with us last year. Barb and Dad had always gotten along, which was a good thing. I was grateful to never have had to negotiate the nasty politics that normally plague the relationships between spouses and in-laws. But sometimes I felt guilty that maybe Barb cared about my dad more than I did. Or at least that she had the appropriate emotional response to his symptoms of memory loss, instead of the colder, more objective one inspired in me. As a doctor who took care of patients with much later stages of dementia, I knew that the memory loss my dad was experiencing put him at most in a mild stage of Alzheimer’s disease. Sometimes it is difficult to determine whether patients who display mild symptoms – having trouble recalling recent events or conversations, for example, or demonstrating forgetfulness about where one has placed objects – actually have Alzheimer’s disease.
I knew that Dad wasn’t just “getting older,” which is the diagnosis patients often prefer to hear. But a part of me couldn’t help rooting for him, for his mental prowess, to hold on for longer. As with most things in life, perhaps part of this was out of self-interest. There is some component of genetics that comes into play in acquiring neurodegenerative diseases, and so rooting for him in part meant rooting for myself.
My dad, who had stepped out of the kitchen a few minutes before, came walking back holding a different object in his hands. “Hey son, take a look at what I found,” he called.
“Your hearing aid?” I supposed hopefully, though I knew in all likelihood it was not. My dad was a stubborn man, not one to openly admit to mistakes. Had he actually found his hearing aid, he probably would have simply continued using it without ever mentioning that he had found it. Such an utterance would implicate him in an act of forgetfulness that he, like I, preferred to overlook for the time being.
Ignoring my comment, or perhaps not hearing it – it was always hard to tell which was the case – my dad handed me a picture frame. Inside was a photo taken from when I was a little boy. It was of me, my dad, and my mom standing next to a sculpture my dad had created for a public library in Louisiana, where we had lived during my childhood years. The structure featured a couple of children admiring a spiral of books. For a man who boasted about specializing in unconventional art, my dad had made a lot of conventional pieces.
But maybe that was the point. That one must understand what makes art conventional before reimagining it into something unconventional. In fact, as his son, perhaps I was guilty of committing the opposite crime. In spending my days in an academic medical center taking care of patients with the most complicated, unusual, and unconventional of conditions, I seem to have missed, or chosen to miss, a strikingly conventional case, in one of the most important people of my life, standing right in front of me.
