Waiting to Go Home

I have been building fires for my father this winter. I have also been doing portraits of my dad as he sits and watches the fires. He is living and leaving this life with Alzheimer's disease, a condition that slowly but surely erases parts of him before our very eyes.  

The painting sessions last about two hours a day. He sits with his feet up under a cozy blanket in his den of thirty-three years but does not recognize it as his house. Every once in a while he asks my mom, "When are we gonna go home?"

Doing these laptop gouache and acrylic portraits has allowed me to connect with my dad at a time when his connection to his family and the objects in his universe is slowly fading away. This is my way of keeping him alive as long as I possibly can.

This little series of drawings and paintings turns the quiet, private moments of our winter, his winter, into a reverberating, public experience. My dad was fearless in the arms of the public he no longer engages. He was the life of the party and without even having to don a lamp shade. He was gregarious and robust. Now he sits, still, silent, and solemn, in front of the fires watching, waiting to "go home."

Thomas Payne Miller, Jr.
Los Angeles, CA, April 18, 1926 -
Lake Hughes, CA, April 22, 2007