B.C. mother and son cope with dementia diagnosis by creating comics

Sawatsy Sign-Off: Memory Comics “It’s magic!” Adam meets a mother and son coping with a devastating diagnosis through creativity and humour.

Gareth Gaudin and his mom Linda are on an unexpected journey.

“It’s been fun getting to know my mom again,” Gareth smiles.

Their regular car rides together include Scottish dialect lessons:

“You say it like you’re going to spit,” Linda explains from the passenger seat, before they both do their best “auch” and start laughing.

Their soundtrack sometimes includes Linda performing the occasional salty song about an upturned kilt:

“An' every time he burls aroond you canna help be laughin'!” Linda sings with a smile, before they both start laughing again.

Although Linda remembers the lyrics to everything she sang to him when he was wee, she often forgets Gareth’s name and which of her sons he is.

“Where you my first born or my second?” she asks often.

“Your second,” he says gently.

“Second,” she confirms, before trailing off for a moment.

Linda’s been diagnosed with dementia, or as she calls it “doolally.”

“If you’re doolally, you’ve lost the plot in your head,” she laughs.

“How does that feel?” I wonder.

“It’s OK,” she smiles. “You’ve got to die of something.”

Linda was born in Scotland 78 years ago, before travelling to Canada by herself as a teenager and starting her own hair-dressing business, which she ran for decades.

“Watching her come to terms with the idea that she doesn’t have the control she once had is heartbreaking,” Gareth says.

But then, it couldn’t have felt more heart-warming when five-year-old Gareth said he wanted to be a cartoonist when he grew-up, and Linda never stopped saying, “go for it.”

“He was really good,” she says looking over to him with a proud smile. “Really good.”

The support led Gareth to become a comic book store owner, college art teacher, and creator of an autobiographical comic series that he’s been producing every day for almost 20 years. https://instagram.com/gareth_gaudin?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

“How do you translate something as complicated and life-altering as dementia into an inky cartoon?” Gareth wondered when his mom first showed symptoms five years ago.

Luckily Gareth and Linda have always shared common sense of humour.

“If something deadly serious happens,” Gareth says. “All we can do is laugh about it.”

So, when Linda mistakes a coffee-cup holder for seat-belt, or calls Beatles Paul and Ringo “Steve and Pam,” Gareth creates a comic.

“We could make each other laugh,” Gareth says of the dozens of daily cartoons he’s done about Linda. “Which certainly soothed the pain.”

While Gareth also illustrates the inevitable hard times, Linda is striving to make every moment the best of times.

Instead of fighting against the symptoms of her condition, she’s choosing to embrace it’s potential freedoms.

“I’m quite proud of being doolally,” Linda says. “Because I can do whatever I bloody well want now.”

And even when Linda wants to go for a drive with her son to see the mountains, and mistakes them for a picture he painted just for her; even when she arrives and can’t recall Gareth’s name, she never seems to forget how loved he makes her feel.

“It’s magic. Absolute magic,” she says sincerely, before breaking into a sly smile. “But I’m not going to tell him.”