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From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

On a rainy Tuesday, Carl Duzen pulls open the garage door to his Havertown home as his wife, Susan Jewett, watches from the dry kitchen.

He goes inside, dives into his toolbox — “he loves his tools,” Susan says — and finds a screwdriver. An old clunker of a television is positioned under the garage’s main light, and Carl starts unscrewing, pulling off the back and exposing the ‘tube.’

The TV, one of those old cathode ray tube sets, was long ago considered obsolete by a neighbor, but Carl sees something valuable, beautiful in the discarded piece of old technology.

A scientist by training, Carl has taken to alchemy in the last two years, turning what others call junk into works of art.

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Her car parked on the side of a steep Green Lane, Michele Davis looks out over her hometown.

Ahead, there’s the iconic Manayunk Bridge, the face of the neighborhood visible to passers-by on the Schuylkill Expressway. Below, there’s Main Street, where 20-somethings fill the streets on warm summer afternoons and the bars on cold winter nights.

Behind her is the Manayunk she knew as a child: the community center she sneaked into without a membership, the church she attended each weekend, the old neighbors’ homes which have since been sold to strangers.

She takes out the camera, frames the scene before her, presses the shutter, and…

*click*

By Dalia Elsaid

A blood test that costs a fraction of a brain scan could spare patients unnecessary procedures and give doctors more confidence in a diagnosis, according to a recent study.  

Researchers followed 100 memory clinic patients who received a new blood test for Alzheimer’s disease. The test improved diagnostic confidence, reduced unnecessary imaging, and underscored the need for emotional support after results are shared. 

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Alzheimer’s Disease impacts both its victims and the people who care for them.

Poet Holly Hughes knows this all too well, having cared for her mother as she went through the stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

As a poet, it was only natural for her to find solace in works of poetry. After her mother’s passing in 2001, Hughes decided to preserve her memory in a collection of poems about Alzheimer’s in the hopes that it would help those whose lives had been touched by the disease as well.

“I put out a call for submissions and received over 500 in only a few months time…so clearly there was a lot of beautiful work out there that needed a home.”

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

“In 2010 we were hiking on this huge mountain in Arizona. I got scared, and I didn’t want to climb it. I wanted to go back. But there had been a rain, and all the signs were knocked out. Two other women wanted to go back to the base with me, and we got lost.

We’re in this valley, and none of us knew which way was North or South, and it was getting dark. I was so scared. I started to panic, and one of the women was crying, but we decided to be strong, and we just started walking up. We figured we’d just go towards the sky. We crawled and we climbed and we got cut, but we made it to the top and we found our way back down.

That is what every day is like as a caregiver, for me. I wake up and I say, ‘I’m lost in this valley and I don’t know how I’m going to get to the top.’ But every day I have to.”

From time to time, the Penn Memory Center will share selected pieces from Making Sense of Alzheimer’s, a project that explores how people understand and live with Alzheimer’s disease. Through essays, stories, and reflections, this series brings forward voices from patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, artists, and writers.

Patricia Moss-Vreeland has been researching memory for 20 years. The fruits of this research can be seen in her body of work that relates to memory, including a series of digital prints that was on display at Penn Memory Center, “Layers of Memory: Pigment Prints.”