Family Fragments
A parent’s death often leaves adult children with a sense of abandonment and even panic that catches us by surprise. We may have lived enough years to be an adult, but we will always be a child in relation to our parents. We look to them for guidance and wisdom as they are our elders and when they aren’t there anymore it can leave us feeling empty, confused, and lost.
In 2011 when I was 20 years old, I lost my father to cancer. He was 53 years old. The first set of images in this series relate to the memories I have of him through some of his personal possessions and locations in which he spent time throughout my childhood.
Losing my father changed the dynamic of my immediate family and how we interacted with one another. My mother was never quite stable but my brother and I were adults at this point. As the years went by, my mother encouraged us to continue pursuing our own lives, and as young adults in our early twenties, we did just that. My brother pursued music and I went off to college. While the three of us gathered often for holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and other events, we were blind to the pain my mother was in.
In 2016 I moved back home with my mother for a while and I soon realized how bad her depression had gotten over the years. I witnessed her deteriorate physically, emotionally, and spiritually until her passing in 2017. She was stubborn and resistant towards receiving treatment or healing of any kind and no matter how hard my brother and I tried, we couldn’t put the family back together again.
On March 18th, 2017, my 26th birthday, I found my mother lying on the couch hours away from death. She spent 19 days in the ICU. After this incident, I became her caretaker. My mother realized; stubborn as she was; that she was gifted extra time. Six months to be exact. She passed the following September. During these final six months, I documented some of my days with her. It was difficult at the time to really think about photography and capturing these moments because I was in a trauma-fog. I captured images on my iPhone from these events and stored them in a folder on my computer. In 2019 I opened that folder and paired the iPhone images with pinhole self portraits I created.
