Throughout spring 2021, the Frye Art Museum, in partnership with Aging Wisdom and the UW Memory and Brain Wellness Center, presents "On Dementia: Care, Community, and Creativity," a series of three conversations with leaders in elder care who have published books in 2020 that bring hope, connection, and joy to adults living with dementia, their care partners, families, friends, and those who provide support.
On March 11, 2021, Lynn Casteel Harper, author of On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear, spoke with Marigrace Becker, Program Manager, Community Education and Impact, UW Medicine Memory and Brain Wellness Center.
Expanding our understanding of dementia beyond progressive vacancy and dread, On Vanishing provides encouragement and meaningful examples of better ways of caring for, and thinking about, our fellow beings. Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people living with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. It is a rich and startling work of nonfiction that reveals cognitive change as an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.
Lynn Casteel Harper is a minister, chaplain, and essayist. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and Catapult magazine. She is a Barbara Deming Fund grant recipient and the winner of the 2017 Orison Anthology Prize in Nonfiction. She lives in New York City and is currently the minister of older adults at The Riverside Church.
Support independent bookstores and purchase On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear from Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company: cloth edition or ebook. Pre-orders are also being taken for the paper edition.