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Day nine of my twelve days of Patrick Dean. @patrickdeancomics
There is something so heart wrenching about witnessing a freshly fallen tree. It’s leaves are still robust and the skeleton whole, but we all know what’s coming. Life as it’s known it is over.
We had half of a prominent twin oak fall in our yard during the storms last night. I struggled with the discovery and in driving past it to take Julian to school. Teetering on the eve of the anniversary of Patrick’s death, writing and thinking about him so much, I couldn’t help but feel that the air was electric with prescience and hidden meanings this morning.
Enjoy this text exchange between me and Bo as I worked through those big feelings after admitting to him I thought the fallen tree was a sign or a punishment.
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Day eight of my twelve days of Patrick Dean. @patrickdeancomics
Southern Cultures - a magazine published by University of North Carolina - approached me and Robert Newsome last year about wanting to feature an article about Patrick in their special issue on disability. Linked below is the article Robert wrote along with some of Patrick’s early eye gaze art I provided - art he drew using an adaptive device and his eye movements once his hands could no longer move to draw. The article was published a year ago this week. I’m sure a lot of you saw it when it first came out
My part in providing them the art they requested was emotionally excruciating but something that needed to be done in order to honor Patrick, his art, and his journey. The files were saved in a separate account I hadn’t looked at since before he died that included all his phenomenal eye gaze art as well as photos and other files he created from his AAC device (augmentative and alternative communication device).
The location included, among other tender images and documents, the last piece of art he ever created, the one he showed only me (as far as I am aware) and told me with such pain in his eyes that he just couldn’t make it work anymore. He no longer had sufficient control of the last part of his body he could leverage to make art. That was the closest I heard him come to saying anything that sounded like “It’s over. I am done.”
This turned out to be about a week or two before he died. As a storyteller, I am fighting the urge to be more accurate with that timeline, but this would involve opening the file to check the date stamp on the drawing. My heart would then walk right back into the room with him in that devastating moment. Once was more than enough. Y’all just need to know that Patrick kept making art right up until he absolutely couldn’t, and that is a beautiful and devastating thing.
https://www.southerncultures.org/article/drawing-all-over-again/
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Day seven of my twelve days of Patrick Dean. @patrickdeancomics
On the agenda today: movies screen sized memories and panic that exceeds logic. I am trying to make uneasy peace with this as it’s how March, April, and May roll out for me the last few years, but I just can’t pick through photo albums today and narrate at length.
So here’s something I wrote and posted a year ago on a cloudier day than today and a photo of our hands in his final days. He had gone without his rings for a while for logistical reasons, but he had asked me to put them on him again. Maybe they felt like armor or served as an anchor to his core identity in the ebbing tide. I just don���t know. So much remained unspoken at the end.
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“May 2018 was spent suspecting the worst, summoning protection through blood work tithes for IT to be anything but ALS (begging for cancer like it was a lottery ticket), marinating in constant, maxed out anxiety for someone to pull the trigger on the words that would push us into a fringe existence that so few but way too many (more than none) understand.
May 2021 he was as sick as a human can get and still be alive. I was a shell of a wife, mother, circus freak rock star demolition expert raging activist resident lunatic. We had been gestating death together for so long that we had lost the algorithm of life. Not a soul in the wings could get close enough to whisper the next lines in our ears. The end.
May 2023 I have been watching my current storylines weave into my past for a few days now. I’m trying to catch the threads and send them home to the spindle, but my success rate today is abysmal. The forecast right now feels like any given day in that three year stretch between Mays…hazy with an absolute chance of nothing ever being normal again.
There’s always tomorrow for pulling out memories in the sun. Today the light is cast over - my irreverent lauds, vespers, and matins murmured above the shadowless ground.“
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Day six of my twelve days of Patrick Dean.
@patrickdeancomics
Patrick wasn’t the dad who worked all the time. He wasn’t the dad who taught the kids the most efficient way to do yard work. He wasn’t the dad who coached sports. Patrick was the dad who was genuinely interested in his kids’ play and discovery and could maintain a patient presence in whatever passion and joy looked like for them.
My relative strengths as the problem solver, strategist, and communicator created the family infrastructure that was needed in order to give him the space to be successful as this kind of dad. When he got sick, our two roles were even more pronounced. As I spent more and more time taking care of Patrick and managing issues related to the children’s ability to mentally and physically survive watching a parent die in front of them, his attention to their passions increased - his clock was ticking and he wanted to drink in everything about his children he possibly could in the time he had left.
When he was healthy, being a dad involved wrestling (literally, almost every night) with the insatiably physically active Eloise; drawing, painting and crafting times ten; sitting on the floor with Julian for hours while he scripted very specific train track set ups and rescue scenarios; manifesting opportunities for Julian to fish or talking with him about fishing or standing around while he talked to other actual anglers about fishing; and getting both kids to parks and woods and lakes and rivers and shoals and dirt piles and gullies and ditches to play outside as they both dearly loved.
As he got sicker, he certainly pushed himself as hard as he could to continue with these activities, but eventually being a dad looked more like talking to Eloise about her arts and crafts and being genuinely appreciative of her burgeoning talent as only another artist could. Dadding at 100% during ALS looked like spending hours while bed bound watching Julian play video games and listening to him talking about strategy and keeping up with the details of each game so he could throw in questions that showed his genuine interest.
Unfortunately, there were darker days of his illness where being a “good dad” was superseded by the fight to breathe and wracking pain and his near constant need for help that didn’t allow anyone in our home to just be a kid and not a caregiver. For me being a “good mom” during the worst of ALS caregiving was hijacked by the hypervigilance needed to keep an immobilized and dying human alive as long as possible in a home shuttered by a pandemic and further diminished by the strain of constantly coming up short against impossible challenges.
At the point Patrick died, he and I held some very real concerns about where things were going to land for Eloise and Julian after all they had been through. They have done so much better in the aftermath than we had feared. I certainly allow myself some credit for their resilience, but I also know that Patrick’s role as an affectionate, playful, present, and genuinely attentive father in his sickness and in his health fortified them in ways that will sustain them for the rest of their lives.
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Day five of my twelve days of Patrick Dean @patrickdeancomics
My last living sibling, the one I grew up with, died in 2006 in an ultralight plane crash when Eloise was a year old. Poof. Gone. I witnessed my parents mourn their third dead son, each lost in extremely improbable and sudden ways.
Patrick’s father died from brain cancer in 2008 when I was three months pregnant with Julian. He lived about five months after diagnosis, losing his ability to talk, just like Patrick would eventually. At the time, this felt like a very long illness to us.
Those were mine and Patrick’s first two experiences with the death of an immediate family member. My very strong preference in the afterwards was for the Poof and Gone variety.
All of you should note that our preferences concerning death are not being recorded anywhere meaningful.
As Patrick processed his father’s death over the next couple years, he developed an intense anxiety concerning the impact of carcinogens and other environmental health hazards. Pretty much everyone on both sides of his family had had cancer in one form or another. His mother had two very serious episodes of breast cancer when he was a preschooler and then again in middle school. I was diagnosed with and treated for thyroid cancer right after we got married and for the duration of our marriage and my life.
By the time Julian was a toddler, Patrick’s carcinogen and medical phobia was having a daily impact on his parenting, straining our marriage, and impacting his ability to function. After a while (years, not weeks or months), he eventually got to where he could let go of his fears enough to do things like allow us to put lights on our Christmas tree (lead and phthalates), take his prodigy angler son fishing (lead sinkers and lures), sit nearish a campfire built by his wilderness loving daughter, use a cutting board that wasn’t wood or a pan that wasn’t glass or cast iron when we traveled, etc.
Then about five years later he was diagnosed with ALS - a degenerative, terminal, unstoppable disease painstakingly diagnosed through exclusion with no known biomarker in the body, no known cause, and no real progress in its treatment in decades. For years I had reluctantly, but necessarily, served as an in house counselor in helping him to overcome a debilitating fear of chemicals and environmental health hazards, despite my own fears on the subject as a cancer survivor, only to have to hold his hands and walk him towards being told by a truly emotionally stunted neurologist with the Medical College of Georgia’s ALS clinic in Augusta that he had one of the absolutely worst things happening in his body possible.
Situational irony can wreck your perspective for life. Being my doctor, and I have more than a score of them now myself, or my loved one is not always such a fun job. No one can ever kindly tell me “it’s going to be ok” ever again and not get a bird shooting sneer from my inner jeering gargoyle.
Here are some photos I took of the Augusta Riverwalk from the last day Patrick didn’t know for sure that he had ALS and was going to die. We both remembered this moment in the years to come as a remarkably calm, sweet, surreal evening.
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Day four of my twelve days of Patrick Dean.
@patrickdeancomics
Patrick was known for the speed with which he could draw pretty much anything. At Fluke Small Press Comix & 'Zine Explosion and Heroes Con, Charlotte, NC *Fan Page*, he would often throw up a sign selling commissions for $10-20 and draw pretty much anything people would ask him to draw. He would quickly consult some reference material on his phone or otherwise and then be on his way.
Patrick believed in the beauty of the spontaneous line. He hated nothing more than when he would over plan and overwork a drawing, losing the energy that flowed from his hand, body, and mind like electricity.
This is a collection of photos of small portion of the work he created over a couple of days at Heroescon in June 2013. I would guess that most of these were inked with little to no penciling and in 10-30 minutes each - all while talking and chatting with friends and fellow conventioneers.
There’s a lot coming to my mind right now about what it was like to witness him drawing over the years - through sickness and in health, but I promised myself that I would keep this kind of light today for my own peace. Please feel free to share memories of witnessing Patrick creating art or stories about commissions or gifts he may have drawn for you. In fact, I am sure some of these images I have posted belong to some of you out there.
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Day three of my twelve days of Patrick Dean.
@patrickdeancomics
In November 2012, Patrick curated a show at the Georgia Museum of Art in honor of one of his most cherished artists and influences, prolific American cartoonist and illustrator, Jack Davis. Patrick spent months working with friends and colleagues in locating unique, obscure, and significant pieces of Davis’s work and assisted the museum in various ways in bringing this show together.
At the opening event, Patrick went about a million miles out of his comfort zone to give a talk about Davis’s work to a crowd that included Jack Davis himself. Patrick was rewarded for his efforts by getting to accompany one of his lifelong personal art superstars as Mr. Davis candidly and emotionally discussed pieces from his own body of work, some of which I remember Patrick saying Mr. Davis had not seen since he had handed them over to the companies for whom he was freelancing in his early days as an illustrator.
Eloise was old enough to be in attendance, and I remember she was really impressed watching her dad zoom around the room with a microphone handling the Q & A portion of the talk. Knowing how terrified he was to give that speech, I was more than impressed with him myself. Patrick lived his life actively declaring his love of illustration and art in general in one form or another until the end of his days.
Jack Davis died in 2016 and less than seven years after this show, Patrick and I had started working with the Georgia Museum again in curating a show of his own work organized in light of his terminal diagnosis of ALS in 2018. That show would open in early 2020 and be cut short by a pandemic that would impact the last year of his life in ways that I still can’t fully process.
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Day two of my twelve days of Patrick Dean. @patrickdeancomics
I have nightmares almost every night. I woke up this morning in a different time. One hand on my heart and one on my stomach, taking in deep breaths of what isn’t happening.
These images are from spring of 2009. The artist father - signing, dating, and archiving a chalkboard scribble for his first born. Tabling at Fluke Small Press Comix & 'Zine Explosion where many of you first met him over the almost two decades he helped organize the event. The night Julian was born. His hands were the first to hold his son. He was determined to be the one to catch him, but lived in terror of dropping him for months prior. Anxiety and grit held us both together through birth and death.
(Photo credits to Pat Nielsen for the birth photos.)
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I’m going to try having twelve days of @patrickdeancomics from today until the anniversary of his death. I might just drop some photos every day? Maybe some words? I dunno. I just need to do something concrete as my thoughts and memories of the darkest days of his illness are getting louder and more insistent. These are all from late 2011 - deep in his full time home with the kids and henna’d hair era. He carved a pumpkin with the kids every dang year he could from Eloise at 10 months until his hands didn’t work anymore. I believe the suit was him dressed up as we were going out to that year’s Flagpole Christmas party. The selfie was us grabbing a photo together one of the hundreds of times we were wrangling the kids together at Harris Shoals.
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