July 3, 2025
Dear Dementia,
I am currently preparing to speak about you and your relationship with creativity at a conference in August, and I started to wonder what you look like without a creative lens. I don’t know any other way but to view you with creativity.
I surround myself with other creatives working in arts and aging, and so I have a hard time stepping back and seeing life without creativity, innovation, and curiosity. But, as I have been told many times over the years, and in the past 10 months or so experienced myself, that not everyone views life with you in this way.
Without creativity, there is no person centered care. Without creativity there is no innovation. Without creativity there is no flourishing with dementia.
As I think about a world void of this important element of our humanity, I start to feel like a caged bird. As dramatic as that may sound, I am reminded of what care homes looked like in the 90s and early 2000s. As I was not alive pre 1989 I can’t speak to those years, but it was a sterile, clinical, cold world for most people. How can anyone flourish in that setting. How can anyone wake up and agree that their humanity still had value.
I guess you could argue in the world of care homes today that the humanity has been further stripped from the residents, from our elders. You could argue that we have forgotten the value of of suffering. Creativity helps us suffer well. Creativity helps us see suffering in a new way. This is all before we even conceder what faith can do to solidify our flourishing.
Anyway, you and creativity MUST journey together if there is any hope of a flourishing, beautiful, joyfully life. I hope I can at least create a mini ripple of creative thoughts when I speak in St. Louis this August.
Until tomorrow,
Kate
