DIANE HONG/THE TORONTO STAR

Alzheimer's patient at Downsview Services to Seniors are photographed holding objects that have special meaning for them and their loved ones. Francesco Piromalli, 83, always loved to paint and the pursuit helped slow the disease's advance.

Clues to the past

Hands offer a more intimate glimpse into the soul than the eyes, especially when the hands are holding something dear, says Lori Hales, program coordinator at Downsview Services to Seniors in North York. So, this summer, she asked 35 seniors with Alzheimer's disease taking part in the centre's programs to have their pictures taken holding, or doing, something important to them. The photos, by Diane Hong,  offer a window into their personalities, a glimpse into the thoughts they can no longer express. Hales' simple idea, dubbed  A Handful of Memories , soon took on a life of its own.

Participants' families eagerly offered suggestions for those seniors having trouble figuring out what to hold, or why.

The photos were copied and sent to family members throughout Canada. Hales says the program has been a great way for staff to get to know the participants and their families.

And everyone involved got the important message that there is a distinction to be made between the people in the photographs and the terrible disease that is slowly taking them away.

As Hales says, "Hands with wrinkles can really tell a story."

FRANCESCO PIROMALLI
Age: 83

Occupation: Janitor, security guard
Home: Toronto
Francesco Piromalli toiled in jobs that never gave him much satisfaction. But once he got home, he picked up his paint brush and, working mostly in oils, created works of art depicting landscapes or flowers or anything else that inspired him.
“It brought out his creative side,” says his daughter, Maria Carbone. “When you work at menial jobs, it’s nice to have that outlet.”
Piromalli immigrated to Canada from his native Italy in the 1960s, after a brief stint living in France. He painted a little before coming to this country but it was in Toronto that his creative juices really flowed, Carbone says.
And, as the dementia set in, the painting kept his mind active and slowed the disease’s advances. He still paints a little now and shares a colouring book with his daughter from time to time, but she says it’s nothing like she remembers growing up.
“If you could see the kind of painting he used to do and what he does now, it’s really sad.”

Occupation: Seamstress
Bella Yaron lost everything in World War II and came to this country trying to rebuild it.
Born, raised and married in Poland, she lost her husband and child to the Holocaust but somehow survived her years at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
At the end of the war, she married another Auschwitz survivor.
The couple made their way to Canada and to Toronto, where Yaron put her sewing skills to work in the garment district, where she hand-stitched the lining into fur coats.
I remember going to work with her and watching her do it,” says her son, David Zins.
She taught Zins to sew as a young boy, a skill he says has come in handy not only in repairing and adjusting his clothes but also in mastering the often-delicate touch needed in his work as a dentist.
Yaron takes part in the painting and other craft activities offered at Downsview Services to Seniors, which she visits three days a week.
Although she can no longer do it, sewing gave her a nimbleness with her hands that has stayed with her all her life.
Despite my mother’s age, her dexterity is pretty amazing,” Zins says.
He made extra effort to get his mother into the Downsview program, moving her from one long-term care facility to another to make the travel easier.
After the war and the Holocaust and all that she lost, Zins is grateful she has such a place to go to now.
She’s had a rough life,” he says.

Occupation: Librarian, museum staff
Dorothea Hecken had retired when, in the mid-1980s, she had an opportunity that seemed the perfect cap to both her career and her journey through life.
The home in London, England, that Sigmund Freud shared with his daughter, Anna, after escaping Nazi-occupied Austria was being made into a museum and Hecken was asked to sort through the books and letters of the founder of modern psychology.
Born and raised in Berlin, she was fluent in German, the language of much of Freud’s library. She trained and worked as a librarian but had spent most of her career at the Royal Ontario Museum helping it develop displays.
All that experience gave her the perfect combination of skills needed an ocean away at Freud’s house.
”I was studying psychology at the time and my mother was at Freud’s house,” says Hecken’s daughter, Gabriela. More than 20 years later, she is still impressed.
In fact, Hecken was living at Freud’s house. When she arrived, her hotel had no record of her reservation, so she ended up staying in Anna Freud’s private apartment.
Hecken says her mother loved museum work, both at the Freud house and the ROM, but says it could make for a unique experience when mother and daughter went to museums as visitors.
“She was always putting books in my hands,” Hecken says.

LUIS MENDOZA
Age: 78

Occupation: Factory worker
Luis Mendoza owns the dance floor, as anyone at the Downsview Services to Seniors can attest.
“They put on the music and he starts dancing with the ladies,” his daughter Jhoanna Mendoza says with a laugh.
That’s probably why Luis chose to have his picture taken with a sombrero, a souvenir from one of his many visits to his native Ecuador.
Jhoanna says the sombrero is used when singing and dancing, particularly when singing a song about a man’s love for a woman - just the kind of song Luis always loved to sing and dance to.
And so, his daughter says, the sombrero represents her father’s three great loves: Ecuador, music and his wife, who died just three years ago.
Born and raised in Ecuador, Luis was in his late 20s when he brought his young family to Canada. Back home, he was a taxi driver struggling to get by. Aside from the day his future wife jumped into his cab looking for a lift, it was a hard life, Jhoanna says.
In Canada, he made a good living working in various factories but never forgot where he came from. For as long as Jhoanna can remember, he returned to Ecuador every couple of years to visit his many friends and relatives there.
“And we’ll keep going as long as we can,” she says.

SHIRLEY GOLDMAN
Age: “Old enough

Occupation: Bookkeeper
When Sam Goldman looks at the photo of his wife Shirley clasping a bouquet of flowers, it’s not what she’s holding that catches his eye - it’s her hands.
“She was always a talented, beautiful woman,” he says. “She always had beautiful hands.”
He notices what’s on her hands, too. “Did you see the rings? Her wedding band and engagement ring. They’ve been on her hands for 58 years.”
He boasts of her accomplishments - studying commerce, doing the books for insurance companies, taking a break to raise two children (one of whom became a doctor appearing regularly on CBC Radio), her folk dancing with a local troupe. But his protective instincts come out when asked her age.
“You don’t need to know that,” he says. “She’s old enough.”
Shirley Goldman always liked to have flowers around the house, Sam says, by way of explaining why he chose to have her hold a bouquet in the photo. Her father had been an avid gardener and she grew up surrounded by flowers. Maybe that’s why she liked to have beautiful things around the house throughout their married life.
It seems, however, that her own loveliness was enough for Sam.
“She really is a beauty,” he says.

ELIZABETH MATTHEWS
Age: 88

Occupation: High school cafeteria manager
Home: Toronto
Despite what her photo might suggest, Elizabeth Matthews is not Scottish. But the man she met in an army hospital, fell in love with and married, was.
“Dad was in D-Day and got shot. They sent him back to England, and Mom was his nurse,” daughter Rosemary Matthews says. “They got married and moved up to Scotland.”
Falkirk, to be exact. Because she was English, the locals were not always kind to Elizabeth Matthews. Even so, she always loved Scotland. “That’s where she was married and had her children,” says Rosemary, who has two brothers.
The couple moved to Canada 55 years ago at the urging of relatives already here. They settled first in Thunder Bay and then Toronto.
The apron, made from a Scottish towel, was a gift to Elizabeth a few years ago from one of her daughters-in-law. She loved it immediately, Rosemary says, and when it came time for the photo to be taken, there was no doubt. Elizabeth wanted the apron.
“She has to have that apron with her,” Rosemary says. “If she can’t find it, she gets upset.”

JEANETTE MATARASSO
Age: 85

Occupation: Dressmaker
Jeannette Matarasso began sewing as a young girl in Poland. She and her sister made all their own clothes and Jeannette made clothes for other people, too.
Then she moved to Belgium, where she met her husband, and then to Israel, where she married him. Money was always tight, so she kept on sewing.
After moving to Toronto in the early 1950s, she took her sewing skills to the Fashion District and turned her hand to sewing on a massive scale. Once she started having children in the late 1950s, she returned to sewing at home, running a small business doing alterations and making clothes for neighbours.
“When I was little, she made all my clothes,” says her daughter, Linda. “Then, I didn’t like it any more and my dad would take me shopping.”
Jeannette ran her home-based business well into her 70s, when carpal tunnel syndrome forced her to slow down. But she would still be known to buy an article of clothing, bring it home and alter it herself.
“My mother had to be busy, she had to have her hands doing something,” Matarasso says.
Today, her mother sticks to knitting, her dementia making the more-complicated task of sewing too difficult. When asked if she inherited her mother’s sewing skills, Matarasso laughs.
“I can barely thread a needle.”

ESTHER NITKIN
Age: 84

Occupation: Accounting, retail
When a parent slips into dementia, their children are forced to make decisions on their behalf, struggling to imagine what a mother or father would have wanted. And so it was decided by her children that Esther Nitkin, named after a Jewish heroine, would hold a menorah for her Downsview Services to Seniors photo.
But when David Nitkin looks at the photo of his mother cradling a menorah, his feelings are, at best, mixed.
“On the one hand, my mom was very serious about her religion and I think the picture reflects that,” he says.
But he also knows, because Esther lives with advanced dementia, she probably has little understanding of the importance of the object in her hands as a symbol of Jewish identity.
The fact she appears to be pointing at the menorah offers no hope that she recognized it.
“The pointing of her hand is probably a result of the Parkinson’s, not emotion,” Nitkin says.
Esther Nitkin has been able to remain living in her own home, despite the advanced state of her disease, thanks to the 24-hour-a-day care she receives from support workers. It’s what she would have wanted.
On Friday evenings, she goes to her son’s house for the Sabbath. She would have wanted that, too.