In November 2019, my yiayia was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

In March of 2020 my grandparents moved from their home in New York City, to my mother’s home in Connecticut. The past year has been spent navigating our early understanding of the implications of losing one’s memory and this disease.

This constant dance amongst my family arrived when my grandparents did. The pandemic has changed my grandparents access to Alzheimer's care and resources and my mother became the only viable option.

When searching “Alzheimer's and Covid-19”, the same words kept recurring: ‘loneliness’, ‘isolation’, ‘caregiver crisis’, ‘disproportionate’, ‘abandonment’. I was beginning to understand that what I was seeing in my home, the exhaustion, the pain, the frustration, the disorientation, was all being exacerbated by the pandemic within the Alzheimer's community at large. 

Alzheimer’s is chronically under-diagnosed. It is the only top ten cause of death in the United States with no cure. Women make of 65% people affected by Alzheimer’s. Two-thirds of caregivers are women. The prevalence of depression is higher among dementia caregivers than other caregivers. Recent studies have shown by 2050, 12.7 million Americans above 65 will have Alzheimer’s.

This project explores one’s relationship to their memories and a family’s relationship to those memories when the one they belong to can no longer remember. I wanted to find a way to collect these fleeting memories while attempting to understand how Alzheimer's if affecting families at this moment in time.

This is my endeavor to collect the stones she has tossed behind her

in our journey to say goodbye…