I Just Want to Wake Up

Snippets of night-time conversations and drawings create a sense of the pandemic world Heather finds herself in – juggling work, homeschooling her daughter, and taking care of her mother who has Alzheimer’s.

May 1, 2020 · 3m

“My mother has been living with me and my teenaged daughter part time for the last year. When the pandemic hit we lost our personal support workers, and I found myself juggling caretaking, homeschooling and work. Because of Alzheimer’s, my mother’s mind is slowly departing, but her essence has not changed. Much of what she has been experiencing for years –profound disorientation, anxiety, mental fog–is what I was experiencing during isolation. With snippets of night time conversations and a stack of my drawings, I’ve created a sense of our world together — a world of overlapping thought, lapses, bent time, lost words, the absurd, and love.” – Heather Frise