Rubbing hands in the drafty Roh’s Café, my fellow writers scribbled across blank pages, responding to a prompt related to Connor Oberst’s Desert Island Questionnaire song.
I wrote down shoes.
My answer is always shoes. A byproduct of the trade, leftover from the family’s days in the business.
I would abscond with the perfect pair of sensible, but fashionable shoes. Flip flops I could sew out of animal skins. Boots, too. But those fuchsia suede ankle booties? I would escape with them.
A new writer to our circle offered a vastly different response. Russell wrote, “I’ve been thinking about VR in geriatric care…..how you experience reality….how deep can someone be immersed.”
And there we sat, awed by the magical nature of writing prompts. Magical in that his words didn’t surprise me. I too had been thinking about virtual reality, in particular, Mom’s, after observing her earlier in the day. Stranded as she was on another shore, I imagine Mom would carry only memories to a deserted isle.
I had been researching VR in the dementia field for a while, ordering Google Cardboard goggles to play around with the notion. In digging around through various site visits, I discovered the way back. Actually, The Wayback.
In the dementia field, social workers believe triggering memories of joy in one’s life can translate to a sense of peace in the present moment. Many care homes and family members already use various props and pictures to do so. Virtual reality extends that practice.
According to The Wayback website, the project’s mission “will be a series of virtual reality films that faithfully recreate popular, positive moments from our collective past – taking the viewer back to a familiar time and immersing them fully for a few minutes using Virtual Reality.”
Based in England, where most dementia work has been breaking ground, the first Wayback film was developed around the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Exact scenes have been recreated and a viewer can explore the entire experience, complete with graphics and sounds, from various angles using VR technology.
Any viewer can watch this film via Youtube on a mobile phone, or through the use of Google Cardboard goggles.
According to one expert, Dr. David Shearer, an expert on Dementia Care Matters and host of a TV series, Dementiaville,”We are all made up of our emotional memories. As we experience dementia our world seems to shrink – holding on to who we were is a way to hold on to who we are now. Anything that offers the opportunity to connect and be reached is strongly welcomed.”
The overall aim of the project is to create a series of films from various decades that speak to the lifetimes of those experiencing dementia.
When Russell read his words in the café, my world of shoes and his of VR collided across the community table. Long after our writing circle departed for our warmer cars, I reached out to Russell and shared with him about The Wayback.
Russell responded, “WOW. That article encapsulates a lot of my curiosities and hopes about VR. The idea of reliving something to jog memories, etc. I have a more morbid fascination with it too — this idea of losing oneself in VR…what weird psychological issues could arise if someone who is wheelchair-bound or something spent 12 hours completely mobile in VR, then had to come back to their not-so-spry body in reality? Would it be overall beneficial for end of life care? Or would it be depressing to have the option of VR but with the requirement of coming back to your real body?”
In my head, I too often shuffled through other sensational salves for dementia, such as The Wayback or Russell’s notions of losing oneself.
Through the Youtube app, I had watched the Wayback film and a few frolicking dolphin clips all with the Google Cardboard. I grasped the fascination. And I struck upon an idea that expanded on the vision of The Wayback.
When my husband and I toured Havana, Cuba, our itinerary included a social program visit to the Art and Film Institute. We learned how a stop-motion film was made. It was a dreary, but pointed, film about domestic abuse and the film won several awards. A stop-motion film is created via the building of a set comprised of objects and characters, animating the objects and characters one frame at time, and moving and filming them again. It is a long, pain-staking process.
That process tied into The Wayback. And to Mom.
Could I reconstruct a life from scraps of my mother’s belongings? I possessed Mom’s Dumas cashmere coat and her black purse with gold clasp, some old broaches and Christmas tree earrings, several of her Christmas decorations. I also retained her crème ceramic bowl in which she mixed her cookie dough, her flour sifter that still has a speck of flour from 2010 on it, and her cook book collection that ranged from the Joy of Cooking to The New Zucchini Cookbook (she had two). To that end, in my pantry, I stored several of her metal cake molds. Who doesn’t remember Mom’s bunny cakes? She baked shaped cakes for all of us, mine without the coconut fur. She baked a cake every year for Davis, in shapes ranging from Scooby Doo to Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber (Veggie Tales).
With Mom’s personal pictures and objects, could I recreate an hour out of a day in 1975, when my mother would relish the quiet while all were at school and she turned out cookies by the dozen?
Or a significant Christmas, one in which Dad engineered his trains to run beneath the ping pong table or hung the Christmas lights in a straight line, or all Mom’s kids were at her home, having schlepped their bags from the far corners of Ohio or Oregon. Or an evening with all the grandchildren present and superimposed.
Could I reconstruct the two-story colonial home on Lincoln Street, the home that filled Mom with pride? Would she wilt under the weight of the expectation of having to clean it? Through graphics, could I rebuild the ranch on Ridgeland Drive complete with flooded basement, where Mom always proclaimed, as a family, we were happier because we were closer together if happiness meant three girls housed in one bedroom? Would she wait at the back door with Swiss Miss hot chocolate, after we sledded down the hills of the sanitarium?
Through the charmed viewfinder, Mom would be encapsulated in the life she lived. Would she find comfort there? Could she return from that moment to the one right in front of her, where she does not recognize those around her, and still find joy? How long would that joy last? And what would three minutes of stop-motion animation be worth?
Playing that line of thinking out to its bitter end, would the project travel back further in time before Mom chose Dad, or chose marriage over work. Would she have chosen otherwise? Would this leave her with a pang of regret to transport into the present? Would that be considered mind manipulation and who then becomes the POA for a mother’s memory?
Imagine an app where I could view that film of Mom’s time, as personal as a pair of worn shoes, form fitting, evidence of her life and style choices, maybe a chipped heel in a nod to journeys taken. A film that responded to a memory Mom would have carried to a desert isle, more precious than a pair of shoes.
Say that you were stranded on a desert island…
Shoes would still be my answer only because I’d name the VR app InMyShoes. But I would skip the fuchsia booties, maybe kill a rabbit or snake and sew myself a pair of sandals. And replay over and over Mom’s memories stowed away on that sandy shore.
I hovered behind Mom’s chair while she sat at a four-top kitchen table branded with grape juice fingerprints. She pleated a white nylon napkin and the napkin refused to hold its crease. Over and over, Mom dragged the side of her palm across the napkin as she had done for many years with tatted pillowcases and Dad’s dress shirts.
I entered Arden Courts, arms loaded with a 
The sun’s intensity that morning had been too much for all to bear. I escorted Mom inside to the join the resident cat, and Jack came along, courtesy of the activities director.
I swiped left and right between the photos.
Her voice, when saying hello to new faces sprinkled with sunshine, rang through to my heart, resounding of ten days spent in Italy, when I took my parents twelve years ago. I had never seen my mother more radiant than in those moments in the square in Siena, mangiare al fresco, called out by a carabaniere, or holding court tableside with a carafe of vino della casa in Fiesole, above Firenze, with her Italian-American daughters at her beck and call.
Dear Mom,
