Of Tigers and Time Bandits – An Odyssey into Dementia

by Annemarie Jutel

There is a strong graphic tradition of writing about other people’s illnesses.  Tangles (Sarah Leavitt), Mom’s Cancer (Brian Fies), Last Things (Marisa Moss) and even the magnificent fictional Mad with Joy (Joris Vermassen), all address the important question of how we experience and cope with the illness experienced by our loved ones.  Like the first-person illness narrative, they take a creative exploration of experiences of illness, even while one step removed:  not the patient themselves, rather the people who surround them.  There’s a parallel tradition of talking about one’s mom.  Roz Chast, Alison Bechdel and Teresa Wong come to mind as exemplars with a combination of love and cringe, but also empathy.

Tigers and Time Bandits straddles these genres to explain to their readers how it feels to have a mother with dementia.  The story tracks the daughter (Willis’s) experience of her mother’s illness, starting with a stroke from which her mother never fully recovers cognitively.  Even though the mother has spent her life looking after others (and particularly, her own sister with Down Syndrome), she can no longer look after herself, and strains the family unit almost to the point of breaking.

Willis has created an illustrated story with Yuki Mori and Adan Contreras.  The drawing is incredibly light hearted, even in the face of serious stuff.  Mom is depicted as a pink haired character with a tiger tail, ears and whiskers.  The pen stroke is light, and the colouring a delicate pastel watercolour.  It puts me in the mind of Leslie Stein’s characters, despite being slightly more realistic (ish).  Well, Contreras’s  characters have mouths (unlike Stein).  But it is not just the pastel rendering, like Stein, there’s something of the same light treatment of a serious subject, and the expressions of the characters that is symbolically important.  Despite her tiger whiskers, pink hair and striped tail, we sense the despair of disorientation experienced by Willis’s mother.

Pg. 124, The comic rendering of despair is not diluted by the tiger tail

The tiger mom, named Maria, was born in Sicily in 1950 and migrated to the US in the 1950s. She was a hairdresser, a mother and the devoted carer for her younger sister who has Down Syndrome.   She loved, and probably still loves:  angels, chocolate, helping people and her family.  We get to learn more about her through Willis’ negotiations of her own frustrations and sense of loss.

On the one hand, Willis positions this book as a tool to help other people process their emotions; on the other, it’s clearly a manifesto on the shortcomings of the healthcare system in which they experienced her mother’s decline.  She describes the pathway that leads her to accept her mother in new terms:  resulting in improvements for both her mother and herself.

P. 200,  Things improve when Willis learns to accept her mother on new terms.

This is not a graphic memoir, rather it’s an illustrated story book.  It captures the expected frustration, concern, worry, burden and fear that accompanies the unhinging of a close family member, and it does so with a lovely touch.  It is very linear, which may be a way of giving hope to those who are reading the book because it shows how time marches on and how things can change.  This does mean, however, that it may miss some story telling opportunities as a result.  But it’s a pretty book worth reading, either for content or visuals.

Pg. 92, Willis too, despairs

Annemarie Jutel is the author of Putting a Name to It:  Diagnosis in Contemporary Society, and the creator of the graphic The Tear Bottle:  A Graphic Story of Love and Things.