Artist Sara Holbrook turned to her art and photography as a creative outlet while dealing with her husband’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Foster Aborn died in Boston on April 7, 2023. He was 88.
Aborn was born and raised in Rhode Island and attended Dartmouth College. He worked for many years at the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company where he rose to chief investment officer and vice chairman of the board. He began showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s a dozen years ago.
Holbrook and Aborn were together for 35 years.
Below, Holbrook revisits her journey dealing with her husband’s condition and how she used art to relieve her frustrations as a caregiver.
Art is essential to my life. You know, I’m visual and everything sort of matters to me visually more than anything. Even jokes. If a joke is a visual joke, I get it more than I get a spoken joke. It’s important for me to express myself through art.
My name is Sara Holbrook and I’m an artist.
My husband, Foster Aborn, he was kind, he was generous. He was warm and caring and helped so many people with their careers. He was the love of my life.
It was about 12 years ago. He drove home in a snowstorm and he forgot where he was going. By the time he got home, he was flustered and he called his doctor the next day and said that this was not usual. He was worried about his memory. And at that time, he had mild cognitive impairment. They said not to worry, and he was still fine for a long time after that.
I specialized in watercolor, but I took a photography course with a friend out of curiosity in Boston, and I fell in love with photography. And then it was crucial when my husband was ill because I didn’t have time to paint, you know, that takes a lot of time and concentration, if he took a nap or something, I could, I could do my art in stages, which was important.
I started out with dreams. And I would dream up these ideas.
And then I would take a background photo. And then I would take a photograph of myself. I had to be dressed as I needed to be for the photograph and I had to be in the right position. And that was always a little difficult to figure out how to do that, but that worked. And then I put it on the computer and scaled it down and then printed it out and I cut it out and I pasted it onto the background photo and then I rephotographed it. That was my process.
Later, I titled my work “99 Problems” because that also reflects what I was dealing with as a caregiver for somebody with Alzheimer’s.
A perfect metaphor
I found the photograph when I was in Paris and I just was drawn to it for the visual image of it. It was orange and it was a perfume bottle. And I snapped the photo and didn’t think much of it until I started dealing with this dream series. And I put myself in it as a scuba diver that somebody was trapped and couldn’t get out.
And that’s the situation. As a spouse, there you are and you’re dealing with this and that’s what you do, but you’re stuck.
‘Ninety-nine problems’ was a perfect metaphor because you never knew what problem was going to present itself. There were myriad things that would happen to you during the course of a day, just unexpected. I had to feel like Wonder Woman because I was dealing with so much, you know ...
He liked to work more than anything. So, he’d go to his office. So, that worked out until COVID hit and then he couldn’t go in anymore. And that was very frustrating for him, because he didn’t understand at that point anything about COVID. He couldn’t understand that all of Boston was really shut down. He couldn’t go into his office building and he’d wander from the house trying to go to Boston.
He’d walk, you know, and I’d have to run after him at all hours of the day and night. I tried to keep him in, but it was sort of a full-time job just keeping the reins on him.
The hardest part for me was not getting any sleep. I was always, always on alert, on call because he would wake up in the middle of the night and leave the house. So, I had to be ready to try to persuade him to come back or I’d have to follow him outside and walk around in the middle of winter or in a rainstorm. Anything. And call the police sometimes, if I couldn’t persuade him to come back, I had to ... the police knew him pretty well.
How I dealt with it on the worst days was by loving him, knowing that I loved him and that he was a worthy human being. Even if I was frustrated.
I tried to use humor as a way to diffuse the frustration. So, I think you look at it and see both ... you don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you look at my work, but you get it.
This is called “Rinse Cycle,” it was a very, very bad day … It just shows intense frustration.
He saw the work, but it didn’t register with him. He even went to an art opening that I had and he was just happy to be there with the people, but he had no idea of the concept of it.
So, we both love Paris and that was my place for shooting with my camera because I just felt so alive there. In October 2019, I was walking around Paris with Foster and I had been taking photographs, we were heading back to the hotel. And I saw some people gathering. They were carrying these life-size cutouts of people. And I was just fascinated.
I wanted to take a photograph and it wasn’t long at all, but I turned around and Foster was gone. And after an hour of looking, I came back to the hotel and Foster was there with this lovely young man. And this man said he was in fact a researcher in Alzheimer’s and Foster found him in the whole city of Paris and went up to him and asked for help.
Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
I didn’t know I could cope with this ... looking back, I don’t know how I did. I kept him far longer than anybody said that I should have, you know, at home because I loved him, you know, and putting him somewhere just didn’t seem right.
But eventually I had to do it. We were really close to one another, you know, and even when he was in memory care we had fun. I miss, I miss that, you know, you sort of settle at whatever level they are at and he still reacted. I danced with him when I go in, you know, it’s still very intimate.
Your favorite person becomes somebody else
My understanding of Alzheimer’s is, (that) it’s really a different process for everybody, but it is usually very frustrating for the caregiver.
It’s just your favorite person has become somebody else, basically. And that’s, that’s very hard to digest.
If you’re an artist, you are driven to do something artistic. It gave me an outlet. It gave me a way to express how frustrated I was. And somehow that relieved the frustration. And art is terrific that way.
And what amazes me is that my art has helped other people in this same situation, even though they didn’t do the art. For me it was a joy to do the art. But people looking at it, I think, feel that it gives them license to feel their frustration, to own that frustration as well.
I think it just shows that it’s OK to be frustrated and express yourself that way. I hope my art shows that the love that I have for my husband, but also shows that it’s a very frustrating thing to take care of someone with Alzheimer’s.
It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life. It was a long journey to be with somebody with Alzheimer’s because this is really a strange one. You know, when people’s minds go, it’s difficult.
I’ve just been coping, you know, it’s, I don’t know how I’m doing. It’s just going (to) take time. I’m not sure how I’m gonna deal with it. I will deal with it at some point.
And be on another project.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 11 million Americans provide unpaid care for people with Alzheimer’s or other dementias.
