Ode to Mom came from one of the many losses that accompanied my mother’s Alzheimer’s. She didn’t willingly give up her driver’s license or her car. When we finally reached that point, the Registry of Motor Vehicles told me to destroy her license plates.
I couldn’t simply throw them away. Instead, I used tin cutters to cut apart the numbers and words, preserving fragments of “Massachusetts” and “The Spirit of America.” I created a rough surface with plaster to suggest a road, then embedded the pieces of her plates into it in a deliberately disjointed, almost nonsensical arrangement.
Driving had represented independence and freedom. Now the familiar numbers and words were still there, but their order and meaning had been disrupted. There was something painfully familiar about that.
Ode to Mom became a way for me to hold onto pieces of something Alzheimer’s had taken from her. I couldn’t preserve her ability to drive, but I could preserve these fragments of that part of her life and give them another place to exist.