Zzot!

There aren’t a lot of items in Raves that I would classify as haunting and terrifying, but this is an exception.¹ I only knew one of my grandmothers, and only after she was slipping into dementia,² so this has something of a personal connection to me.

The painting on the right is William Utermohlen’s 1967 self-portrait from a series of self-portraits chronicling his descent into dementia. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1996, so this is the first in the series.

• Wired: The Alzheimer’s Self-Portraits of William Utermohlen
• NY Times: Self-Portraits Chronicle a Descent Into Alzheimer’s
• NY Times: Slideshow of Utermohlen’s Self-Portraits

1. It actually got mentioned in one of the Wired feeds a while back, so it might not even be anything new to most of my audience (i.e., Erwin). [↩]
2. Not necessarily from Alzheimer’s, but dementia none the less. [↩]

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