I am

As you are reading these lines somewhere in the world parents mourn their dead children.
A loved one says goodbye to his/her life’s companion with a last breath.
Others are looking at the dawn of a new day having lost their jobs.
Or the ability to perform simple every day tasks, as the result of an accident.
Some others are searching through the wreckage to find the remains of their home.

Great pain; the common thread of these tragic situations. Pain you can feel to your bones if you’ll step for a moment in their shoes.
Can you, please, do it now? Just for a few seconds………………………………………………………
……………………. Imagine now the magnitude of the pain of someone experiencing all the above situations in one day…

Welcome into the reality of Alzheimer’s disease.

These thoughts roam in my mind for some reason (see PS) as I hold this old driftwood.
The terror of not being conscious of yourself.
Your memories, your anchors in life’s sea, shattered; leaving you at the mercy of the waves.
Being unable to finish the sentence ” I am ” because everything that give its meaning are missing.

So, here I am with this noble driftwood which bears proudly the marks of a long journey.
It takes its place encompassed by the phrase “I am ” in 46 different languages.
A tribute to all that have & still are fighting this battle.

PS : If you haven’t already, watch the documentary ” Alive Inside” ; you won’t regret the time spent. Witness the magic of music as it pierces through the alienation inflicted by Alzheimer’s disease.

Watching it brought me memories of my grandfather, Nikolaos.

During his last years it became increasingly harder for him to recognize us. I remember that sometimes I was asking him to tell me a song he used to sing to me.
After a jump start with the first verses, he was on fire !
And then he would call me with the nickname he used; he would look at my father, seeing his son and sit together to have a smoke…

The ” Alive Inside ” film enabled me to understand how did that spark of life appear in his eye ( and I say eye, cause the other one was made of glass. Just because , during the II World War, some fucking Gestapo officer wasn’t pleased with an answer my grandpa gave him._ )

Think about it for a sec :
Sometimes, the gap between being tragically lost & being able to emphatically say ” I am ” can be as small as a pair of earphones and a favorite playlist.

Driftwood, hand sculpted plaster 77 cm

I am in :
Arabic, Afrikaans, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Cebuano, Chinese, Czech, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Gujarati, Hansa, Hebrew, Hellenic, Hindi, Hmong, Igbo, Irish, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latin, Lithuanian, Maori, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Sesotho, Sinhala, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh.