“Reaching Evelyn: A Documentary Study of Dementia Patients during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Lindsey Pelucacci, Stony Brook University.
While the COVID-19 pandemic affected everyone, it hit nursing home residents the hardest. As of summer 2021, the pandemic has killed over 184,000 people nationwide who live and work in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. At the time, this number accounted for about 31% of the U.S.’s pandemic deaths (sources: AARP; N.Y.T.). Residents fortunate enough to have survived faced an additional burden: already isolated in “normal” times, they had to endure some of the strictest safety measures of lockdown. What effect might this extreme isolation have had on them and their loved ones?
Seeking to answer this question, I made a documentary called Reaching Evelyn. The documentary centers around the Gino J. Merli Veterans Center, a nursing home in my hometown, Scranton, PA. In it, I track the experience of several workers, residents, and their families, focusing especially on my grandmother, Evelyn, who has dementia, and on my mother, Debbie, who cares for her. I trace their journey, observing their struggle to stay connected through window visits and Google Duo, as Evelyn’s memory fails. About mothers and daughters, my film also implicitly ponders maternal lineage; to steal Joyce’s pun, Evelyn becomes Eve-line, and my film wonders how one can reach her, if at all.
In my proposed presentation, I intend to show clips from the film, and then to reflect on the experience of the film’s creation. This reflection, itself an act of memory, may address several questions about memory: What effect did the pandemic’s lockdown protocols have on aging nursing home residents, particularly those with dementia? How can this film, as a time capsule, inform our collective memory of the pandemic (which we’d perhaps like to suppress)? How can we best remember our loved ones as their own memories fail?
Lindsey Pelucacci is a fourth-year English PhD candidate at Stony Brook University. Her research interests include modernist literature, contemporary film, and filmmaking. She currently pursues a multimedia dissertation that explores the complicated relationship between queer sexuality and Christian spirituality.
“‘No miracle is worthy’: Childbirth, Twilight Sleep, and the Medicalized Female Body.” Haleigh Yaspan, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.
Twilight sleep, a combination of scopolamine and morphine, emerged in the early 1900s from physicians’ attempts to clinically manage women’s labor pain. The mix provides some measure of pain relief, though it is better known for its amnesiac effect, which precludes patients’ remembrance of labor—though they remain conscious enough to respond to contractions and doctors’ instructions throughout the birth experience. Per a prominent Progressive Era obstetrician, the drug combination was administered “to abolish the memory of the labor as much as possible” [emphasis mine]. The advent of twilight sleep in the United States both reflected and shaped shifting conceptions about the social position of women (and the importance of women’s health), the nature of the doctor/patient relationship, and the appropriate role of a male-dominated health profession in labor and delivery.
The phenomenon of twilight sleep lends itself to a study of the intersection of medicine and proto-feminism, while highlighting the tension between the body of the woman and the body of the mother. What does it mean to experience excruciating pain in labor but not remember it, despite awakening with a body bearing the scars of labor? How does this strain the relationship between the body and the self? Finally, what particular resonance does this have when considered in the context of an era of increasing medical professionalization, in which (primarily male) obstetricians began to edge (primarily female) midwives out of the professional territory of birth? Increasing perinatal interventions, including for pain management, represent a project of medicalizing pregnancy and birth that continues to this day. Questions persist about how best to grapple with memories of labor pain, the prioritization of the current versus future self, and the role of the medical field in facilitating women’s experiences in labor.
Haleigh Yaspan is a graduate student in the Medical Humanities and Bioethics program at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and a graduate of Tufts University, where she studied English and biology. She grew up on Long Island, NY and currently lives in Rochester, NY with her husband.
“In Oblivion and Old Age: An Exploration of Remembering and Aging in Select Texts” Shobha Elizabeth John, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal.
This paper explores themes of remembering and aging set against the backdrop of imposed oblivion in two literary texts, namely The Buried Giant (2015) by British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and The Memory Police (1994) by Japanese author Yoko Ogawa as translated by Stephen Snyder (2019). Both novels engage with a world where the past is either completely obscure or rapidly being forgotten, problematizing the nature of memory, the imperative to remember, and the sociopolitical ramifications of conscious erasure. The restricted mnemic faculty which results from imposed forgetting is intertwined with geriatric experiences, notions of aging and obsolescence in these narratives. Questions of the passage of time and transience become pertinent considerations since memory is emphasized as integral to interpersonal relationships and reminiscence in one’s twilight years. In a society forced to fixate on forgetting, the role of the aged who are often repositories of collective and intergenerational memory become tenuous, in danger of becoming obsolete in a world that has passed them by. The loss of memory being generated by forces which are external and inaccessible informs the quotidian relationships between the characters and how they respond to or resist the world of oblivion around them. Although amnesia is thus unrelated to biological ailments common to an aging body in these narratives, this paper also investigates whether the body itself becomes a site onto which the weight of memory and forgetfulness can be mapped. Putting these novels in conversation, this paper foregrounds the centrality of memory to socio-cultural meanings of aging and ways of apprehending a past that is becoming increasingly inaccessible.
Shobha Elizabeth John is a Ph.D. Research Scholar at the Humanities and Social Sciences Department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, India. She completed her Bachelors’ and Masters’ Degree in English Language and Literature. Her current research interests include Memory Studies, Technology Studies, Popular/Digital Culture, and Medical Humanities.
