Fairy Note: The Last Banana, Cognitive Scattering and the Ethics of Ambivalent Care

I left Cambridge angry.

The immediate cause appeared almost absurdly small. My father had bought three bananas for me because he knows I like a banana on my muesli. I had been expected the week before but work intervened, and by the time I arrived the bananas were brown. Not completely brown. Past their best.

I ate one on the first morning and another on the second. On the third morning, I picked up the remaining banana and said, mainly to myself, “Oh, the last banana. I’m going to eat the last banana.”

Lolly looked at me.

“That’s not very nice of you. What if somebody else had wanted one?”

My father immediately explained that he had bought the bananas specially for me.

Nothing happened.

I ate the banana.

But something had happened. Her accusation returned me to a childhood memory of eating the last chocolate from a box. Lolly had not simply called me greedy. She had assigned an intention to me. I had eaten the chocolate deliberately, she said, so that nobody else could have it. There were other accusations. If I forgot to replace a toilet roll, it was not because I was a child with undiagnosed ADHD whose attention had moved elsewhere. I had deliberately left somebody stranded without toilet paper.

The injury was not merely being told that I had done something wrong. It was being told that an adult understood my intentions better than I did.

I wrote about this in a piece called The Last Banana. Writing it was intensely therapeutic. With the assistance of AI, I was able to take an overwhelming, angry and partly childlike emotional state and give it narrative form very quickly. The system’s linguistic competence became a cognitive and literary scaffold. It helped me find sequence, pace and proportion without removing the experience’s emotional truth.

I have previously described this as a form of technically mediated emotional flattening. By flattening, I do not mean that the feeling becomes shallow or untrue. I mean that its unbearable simultaneity is temporarily reduced. Anger, childhood memory, shame, injustice, dementia and present-day care can be placed beside one another. The experience acquires a surface across which thought can move.

But there is a danger here. AI can turn an emotionally charged interpretation into persuasive language with alarming speed. It can launder anger into eloquence. A beautifully structured account may begin to feel definitive simply because it has acquired literary coherence. The scaffold can help me think, but it can also reinforce the position from which I began.

The Last Banana is true to what I experienced. It is not a neutral account of Lolly. I control its sequence, its remembered dialogue and its final emphasis. Lolly cannot offer a counter-narrative. Dementia has placed me in the ethically powerful position of being the person who remembers.

The sentence “But I remember” therefore contains both testimony and authority. My memories of childhood injury matter, but they are not a complete history of the relationship. The ethical task is not to deny their truth. It is to distinguish between what Lolly intended and what her words did to me.

The banana incident was a moment of danger. Fifty years of time collapsed around an ordinary object. There was no gradual recollection and no safe historical distance. I was fifty-eight, holding a brown banana, and I was also the child being told that she was cruel.

The writing gave that child a voice.

The image that followed did something different.

During the same visit, I heard Lolly screaming at five o’clock in the morning. I heard my father shuffling down the corridor to help her. I later discovered that she had stuck a sanitary pad to her pubic hair and was in considerable pain.

I had not witnessed the scene. I had heard the scream and received an explanation afterwards. When I began generating images, I was therefore not reconstructing a visual memory. I was constructing a visual hypothesis.

In the images, I displaced the pad from the pubic area to the armpit. This made the incident visible without attempting a literal representation of Lolly’s most intimate bodily exposure. I generated an elderly woman sitting in a bathroom with sanitary pads stuck incorrectly to different parts of her body.

The earliest images were not particularly accurate. The bathroom was wrong. The woman was more generically elderly and physically frail than Lolly. The pads were placed across her arms, clothes and legs in ways that had not occurred. Later versions became more precise, with the correct clothing, a more recognisable bathroom and a single pad painfully caught in the armpit.

Yet the first images remained among the most powerful.

I think this is because they moved beyond illustration. The multiplication of the pads visualised something the factual account could not. An ordinary object had become detached from its familiar network of meaning. The woman recognised that the pad belonged somewhere near the body, but the relationship between object, clothing, skin and action had scattered.

To use a sanitary pad requires an extraordinary sequence of mostly invisible cognitive operations. The user must recognise the object, recall its purpose, distinguish its surfaces, remove the backing, orientate it spatially, locate the appropriate part of the body and clothing, anticipate the adhesive action and understand the consequences of placing it elsewhere.

For most of us, these operations have disappeared into the transparency of ordinary action. We do not experience them as a chain of intellectual achievements. Dementia makes that hidden infrastructure visible by interrupting it.

A similar thing happened when I saw Lolly attempting to cut cheese. She retained the overall intention to cut it, but held the knife by its blade and prepared to press down. The goal remained while the embodied organisation of the action briefly collapsed. I stopped her before she cut her hand. Afterwards she returned to living and functioning much as before.

This is why I have begun to think of dementia not only as decline, but as cognitive scattering. Lolly is not uniformly absent or incapable. She inhabits islands of competence interrupted by local breakdowns in coherence. She can speak intelligently, recognise people and participate in ordinary life. Then, for a moment, a knife no longer offers its handle, a sanitary pad no longer belongs inside clothing, a familiar husband becomes an impostor, or the house she has occupied for years becomes a replica of itself.

The world does not disappear all at once. Its relations scatter.

The early bathroom images captured this scattering. In one, the woman looks down and continues trying to solve the situation. In another, her hands are open in a gesture of bewilderment. The sanitary pads are recognisable, but their proper place has been lost. They have become fragments of an action distributed across the body.

The image also changed my emotional position.

Writing The Last Banana had allowed me to recognise my own anger and the childhood injury beneath it. The bathroom image returned Lolly’s experience to me. Seeing the imagined scene from the doorway gave me access, not to her actual consciousness, which remains unknowable, but to a visual proposition about what it might be like to inhabit a world in which an intimate and familiar object suddenly becomes incomprehensible.

The image restored my empathy.

That does not mean that it proved my anger was mistaken. Nor did it explain the anger away. My father’s explanations had not done that. Telling myself that Lolly has dementia was factually correct, but it did not release me from the childhood position into which the banana accusation had returned me.

The image allowed a different psychic position to become visible.

The movement was not from anger to explanation and then forgiveness. It was from anger to writing, from writing to self-recognition, from image-making to recognition of the other, and from that recognition towards renewed empathy.

There are two psychic snapshots here. The Last Banana is a psychic snapshot of the accused child who remains active within me. The bathroom image is a visual hypothesis about Lolly’s fractured relationship with her body, objects and the ordinary world. Together, they expose the dyad.

This could appear to demonstrate the success of my method rather too neatly. The writing helped me process anger. The image restored empathy. AI functioned first as a literary scaffold and then as a visual scaffold. A difficult experience was transformed, and the artist emerged with greater understanding.

But this account is ethically insufficient.

I used an intimate crisis belonging to a woman with dementia to make an image.

The image restored her suffering to me, but it also made that suffering available as artistic material. Its therapeutic value to me does not automatically justify displaying it to others. The image derives its force from bodily vulnerability, confusion, ageing, incontinence and the breakdown of capacities that the woman depicted cannot knowingly consent to having reconstructed.

The doorway composition intensifies this problem. It can be understood as the position of the carer, close enough to witness but unable to enter another person’s experience. It can also make the viewer an intruder, looking into a private bathroom at a cognitively impaired woman in distress.

The image’s beauty does not solve this problem. It may make it worse. Grain, muted colour, editorial composition and the visual language of photography can turn suffering into something compelling. The more successful the image becomes aesthetically, the more carefully I must ask what pleasure and power it offers its maker and viewer.

Nor can taboo provide an uncomplicated defence. Incontinence, sanitary products, menstruation, ageing female bodies and dementia are commonly hidden. Making them visible may challenge that concealment, but transgression is not automatically liberation. An image may resist shame, or it may produce spectacle. It may restore personhood, or invite the viewer to stare at degradation.

The fact that the image returned Lolly’s humanity to me matters. It does not provide an ethical alibi.

This question becomes more difficult because my care for Lolly is already ambivalent. I am not caring for somebody who consistently cared for me. Our relationship contains affection, rejection, injury, identification, obligation and resentment. My involvement is also triangular. I care for Lolly partly because I love my father, and caring for him draws me into caring for her.

Dementia did not create that ambivalence. It removed some of the distances through which I had previously managed it.

In my undergraduate dissertation, Beyond Words, I considered Freud’s argument that mourning is complicated by ambivalence towards the lost love object (Stephens, 2025). Mourning does not concern somebody we loved simply and without conflict. Leader writes that “ambivalence towards the one we’ve lost, these mixed feelings make us feel guilt” (2009, p. 47). Love, anger, relief, resentment and guilt may continue together, making separation from the object psychologically difficult.

Dementia creates a peculiar variation of this condition because the person is being lost while remaining physically present. I am mourning the intellectually formidable Lolly who is disappearing, while also confronting the earlier Lolly who hurt and rejected me. Freud’s phrase, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego”, acquires a different meaning here. The banana incident cast the shadow of an earlier relationship across the present, returning me immediately to the position of the accused child

Leader observes that “hostility to the dead is not well tolerated” (2009, p. 43). Hostility towards a vulnerable person with dementia may be even harder to admit. The carer is expected to understand that the person is ill and therefore to meet accusation, repetition and rejection with compassion. Yet illness does not erase the history through which those actions are experienced. Anger becomes both psychologically inevitable and morally difficult to express..

Leader argues that mourning requires a “new dialogue of mourning” (2009, p. 78). In Dancing with Dad, I proposed phototherapy as one possible language for that dialogue when ordinary speech had failed. In this recent experience, AI-mediated writing and image-making performed related but distinct functions. The writing gave form to anger and childhood injury. The image reintroduced Lolly as a suffering subject. Together, they enabled a dialogue with a relationship that is not over, but is already being lost.

Anger is not an embarrassing failure of care. It belongs within care, particularly when care takes place inside a relationship already shaped by injury. But anger can become dangerous when it is denied, just as artistic work can become dangerous when it presents its therapeutic value as evidence of its innocence.

This is where I return to the ethics of fronting the mirror.

Autobiographical and autoethnographic work inevitably uses experiences that involve other people. Intimate life does not divide neatly into material that belongs to me and material that belongs to somebody else. Lolly’s crisis was bodily hers. It also entered my life as a scream in the corridor, an act of care, an imagined scene and an emotional consequence.

That entanglement does not give me unrestricted ownership. It gives me responsibility.

Fronting the mirror means that I cannot expose Lolly’s vulnerability without also exposing my own implication. I must include not only tenderness and concern, but appropriation, anger, fascination, aesthetic pleasure and power. I must be able to say that I made an image from a crisis that was not mine bodily, that the image helped me, and that this help does not cancel the violence involved in making another person’s suffering visible.

Perhaps that unresolved doubleness is the real phantom mirror.

The image allowed me to see Lolly again as a person experiencing an incomprehensible world. At the same time, it showed me what I am capable of doing with her experience.

The mirror returned her subjectivity to me.

It also returned my own gaze.

References

Freud, S. (1917/2007) “Mourning and Melancholia”. In L. G. Fiorini (ed.), On Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia. London: Routledge, pp. 43–65.

Leader, D. (2009) The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression. London: Penguin Books.

Stephens, E. (2025) Beyond Words: Can Phototherapy Facilitate Mourning? A Psychoanalytic Exploration through Personal Photographic Practice. Unpublished BA Photography dissertation. University of Suffolk.