Story of one woman trying to change the perception of dementia.
Suzka is an artist, a painter who looks at her mother's dementia much differently than most people. Maybe it's her imaginative approach to reality that makes Suzka's book Wonders In Dementialand so delightfully digestible. From Suzka talking with the ghosts of Picasso and Giacometti to her mother dancing with dementia's gypsy ladies that visit her in the night, the author takes us to a place just outside our-selves.
This gripping, fun, heartbreaking, ultimately, uplifting book puts you directly inside the interesting (and likable) mind of the author Suzka as it comes to terms with memory, identity and dementia. The reader is provided with an imaginative look into the colorful possibilities inside demntia.
"My name is Suzka. I am the author, narrator and character in Wonders In Dementialand as well as the last person you would think to be a caregiver. However, when my mother was diagnosed with dementia, I was suddenly left in charge. I had no choice but to think like a painter. My friend Gulley Jimson, once told me, even the worst artist that ever was, a cross-eyed mental deficient with the shakes in both hands, about to paint the first stroke, looks at the blank canvas as an adventure. This was my fresh canvas."
"I looked at this little woman as if she was a magician, a seer, a magnificent foreigner to conformity who was able to travel everywhere and anywhere, collecting the secrets and mysteries of the world. It was exciting and mysterious at the same time. I felt like a little girl sitting in the front row at the circus, so close to the magic you could touch it. Ah, the wonders I found while living in Dementialand." - Suzka
"I was protective of my mother. But maybe in the truth, I was defending my own forgetful ways and craziness. I loved crazy. All artissts love crazy - painters for sure. Crazy smears itself on thirsty canvases hungry for involvement with the beautiful, the brilliant and the unattainable. Crazy talks to me on buses and loosens old thoughts that had been stuck in my head for years. Crazy slaps my thinking silly, wakes me up and more than often prices open my closed eyes. They are my ah-ha moments - those times when the gods had turned my head 180 degrees and inside out to look at life differently. Between reality and fantasy, past and present, the palpable and the mysterious. I found living with my mother, with the dementias and the crazies, the gypsies and the saints, the airheads and the unknown, rather enjoyable in a crazy way."
Wonders In Dementialand – page 291
