My dad passed away two and a half years ago after living with cancer as long as he could. Having time to know it’s coming doesn’t make the change feel any less sudden. Certain life milestones can’t be understood until they’re lived, and there’s no way to prepare for something so foreign to your understanding of the universe.
My mom was suddenly faced with a whole world of “stuff” that was entirely without context, and had to find a way to walk through it all. I have no idea how many challenges she faced alone, or how many hours the echoing silence of that empty house almost broke her.
She reached out crying more than once, not for pity but to share her agony with somebody who would listen and say to her “That sounds awful.” She would get it out of her system, dust off her tiny white sweater, and keep moving forward. One computer or plumbing problem at a time.
I was in Chicago this week to visit my grandfather before that window closed, and spent a few days farting around town with mom. She humored my exuberance for photos and was more than happy to take a detour to Elder Lane Beach after dinner when the light was “EFFING BUTTERY.” We bounced around the beach and chatted about how it was a shared venue for our high school adventures, and we were so happy to see the next batch of kids stumbling down there at dusk for fun and mischief.
“Life (shenanigans) finds a way.”
We managed to find an excuse to hit at least one of the neighborhood beaches each of the three days I was in town. It was certainly food for my dry ass TX soul, and she was more than happy to walk around in her own thoughts while I took 37 out-of-focus pictures of seagulls.
When I got home, I had time to review the pictures, praying there were at least one or two “bangers” among the 300+ shutter clicks that were the background music of the visit. Looking back through them now, I see all the missed chances, the almost-there compositions, and 10 or 12 things to get less shitty at.
Sometimes a photo ends up telling so much more than you had any way of knowing when you took it. Just as you don’t know how it feels for your life to shift into a universe that doesn’t obey the laws of physics, you can never quite appreciate the shot in the moment. Once you sit with it, it unfolds in your heart.
I spent two or three rounds editing this picture for aesthetics before I really saw what was there. A lone woman in her mid-70s looking out over the horizon, wondering and hoping. I have no idea what her hopes and dreams are, and I suspect she’s still working on figuring that out herself. This photo of a small lady standing tall on her hopes and dreams for what is to come, still screaming to hold onto what has been lost, just hit me right there. Sitting in the dark of my living room at 1am after a long day of travel, I stopped looking at the colors and technique and felt what the picture was saying.
I cried a little in my house full of my own family.