08/12/2024
EXERCISE 3: THE EXPRESSIONIST GAZE
(Sutures, 2024)
This exercise was difficult.
I don’t know if I’ve just been so busy or if I’ve been finding all sorts of ways to avoid it, but it took me quite a while to get here.
Expressionist art often makes use of abstract and distorted forms to paint or express emotions. In photography this can be done in camera or in the digital or chemical darkroom.
For this exercise, I decided to create an image by revisiting my archives. It felt like reaching into my own memory to retrieve a feeling, then finding a way to bring that emotion back into the present moment through visual expression.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve been dragging several feelings around with me. They are feelings of struggle, fear, strength and loss.
When my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2015, 7 years after my father died, we didn’t panic. We were told that Parkinson’s wasn’t a death sentence and although it would be difficult the medication worked very well and it would keep the symptoms at bay for quite some time. Unfortunately that wasn’t the way things panned out. Fairly quickly we came to understand that her Parkinson’s was atypical, considered a “parksinsonian” disease but never fully diagnosed. The initial symptom that led her to see the neurologist was a sudden change in her handwriting. All her letters would become smaller and smaller as they traveled across the page and she had no control over it. Fairly quickly other symptoms began to appear and the most debilitating for her was the slowness and rigidity. For a very hyperactive, independent woman whose passion was being out in the world…traveling, shopping, attending cultural events and tending to her garden…this literal brake was a nightmare scenario for her. A woman always in control who hated the idea of depending on someone suddenly found herself vulnerable and limited and looking to me, her only child, to help her navigate this new reality.
At this point it felt like a journey we were both embarking on. She as the passenger, and I as the driver. We were already very close, best friends in many ways, but this was not the direction we expected to take. We were veering off course into unknown territory.
The photograph represents not only the physical pain she endured, but the psychological struggle she and I both experienced at the loss of her autonomy. Like any death, the first stage involved denial but that didn’t last long as the symptoms made it real very quickly. Then for several years she got stuck in a cycle of anger and hope. She was angry at her body, angry at her lack of independence, but hopeful that new technologies, research and her abundance of physical activity might slow the onset of muscle stiffness and stave off the creeping shadow of dementia. In those moments of weakness, she often directed her frustration at me. These were by far the hardest years for me. Watching her cry uncontrollably at the loss she was experiencing. I felt a mix of empathy, frustration, powerlessness and impatience. I hated to hear her cry. Hated it. As an empath, I absorbed all her psychological pain and felt it deep within my bones. I wanted to help her, to ease the burden, so I remained by her side, a constant presence in her pain. In the beginning this reversal of our roles did not sit easily with her. She feared being controlled and did everything in her power to defy my recommendations and rules.
In 2017, she took the car keys and left the house on her own when she should not have been driving. As I was teaching a class that afternoon, I kept receiving call after call, both from her number and an unidentified one. I waited until class was over to check my messages but I didn’t even have a chance before I received another call from a bank manager telling me that my mother had fallen near her car and the car had rolled over her. She was on her way to the hospital in an ambulance and there was no more he could tell me. A few minutes later, I got a call from my mother who sounded surprisingly calm. She described being knocked down by the wind while getting into the car and the car rolling onto her leg. She reassured me that she was ok and stopped my mind from panicking. I told her I’d meet her at the hospital and called my husband to drive me there because I was too emotional to get behind the wheel. We found her, afraid and in shock. The doctors said she had compartment syndrome impeding all blood flow in her leg. My mother who did not want her leg to be amputated agreed to a a fasciotomy that would take almost 6 months to fully heal.
That was the beginning of our new life.
“Sutures” represents my personal journey as my mother’s caregiver. From that moment on we went from one emergency to the next. Several falls that required stitching and stapling. Head traumas and even an episode of septic shock that almost took her from me. Years that blurred into a relentless cycle of medical appointments and panicked phone calls. Days on end of crying and confusion. Packing and moving while trying to keep life as normal as possible. It was exhausting, draining, sad, demoralizing. I tried to be a good mom to my son, a decent wife and partner to my husband and grow a career that never felt it had a chance. My mother’s health issues had filled 80% of my headspace and demanded constant physical contact.
Twelve days from today will mark a year since my mother died. Exactly one year ago I was telling her that our paths would soon diverge. She was no longer able to eat and we knew where we were heading. Luckily, the dementia we feared never fully set in. She lost short term memory, but it had no effect on recognizing people or remembering her past relationships. She remained fully herself in her mind until the very end and those final ten days with her were a gift. Facing the approaching end with clarity and acceptance allowed us both to embrace a sense of control and find peace together.
“Sutures” sits on the horizon of two worlds. The before and the after, stitching them together into a new whole...a single life, divided and scarred, yet somehow mended—transformed by the act of healing. There are the physical sutures on my mother’s body and the invisible ones imprinted deep within my mind, now slowly healing. Each stitch a reminder of the wounds we've both carried.
