Taryn Simon has never had a cup of coffee. A doctor spooked her about it as a kid, so the artist, 51, runs on iced tea — and, now and then, on a bowl of Life cereal drowned in Diet Coke, the breakfast her father started each day with. “It’s actually really good,” she tells the Journal’s Lane Florsheim in this weekend’s My Monday Morning. Breakfast isn’t her first move of the day, though. Somewhere around 6 or 6:30, before anything else, she opens the camera feed from her father’s house. He has Alzheimer’s.
She looks for where he is, then scrolls back through the night. Her father’s U.S. government work took him around the world before he quit to build arcade games, and Father Country I Do Love You, the show now filling the rotunda at the Guggenheim, is dedicated to him. The Alzheimer’s means his own story is out of reach for her — so she told someone else’s: an unnamed FBI agent’s nearly 30-year career, pieced together over almost a decade of roadside meetings and turned into more than 1,000 photographs, videos, sculptures and texts. She’s even used AI so her father can narrate part of it, since he can no longer read.
Then the rest of the routine: kids dressed, fed and on the bus, followed by laps of Washington Square Park, sometimes for hours and sometimes 30,000 steps before 11 or noon. Her prized possession is the large-format Sinar camera he gave her, in use since she was 18, plus his carefully organized Kodachrome slides. Pet peeves: lunch, imprecision and a growing lump on her head she’s named Ralph. Best advice, from Dad: “Be your own boss.”
Our read
Take away the Guggenheim and the Diet Coke and Simon’s morning is a familiar one: an adult child checking on a parent with dementia before the day starts. That’s a Retirement (M10) and long-term-care problem as much as a family one, and the planning runs on a clock. The papers that let someone else decide — a durable power of attorney for money, a health-care proxy, HIPAA releases so doctors will talk to you — generally have to be signed while the parent can still understand them. Ideally they’re done long before a diagnosis; after one, they’re urgent. The same goes for cameras: monitoring sits better when the person being watched got a say in it.
Then the money (M11). Dementia care tends to be long and custodial, and Medicare generally doesn’t pay for that kind of care; long-term-care insurance usually has to be bought while you’re healthy, and Medicaid has its own spend-down rules. Know which one your parent’s plan leans on, and name a trusted contact on their brokerage accounts — a slipping memory is a scammer’s favorite target. Then check your own plan, because caregiving eats hours, careers and savings. The roof’s easier to patch before the forecast turns.