2024 ©Julie Fowells
all rights reserved
The distinction between grief and depression might seem insignificant to some, but the chasm between the two is big enough for guilt and confusion to bounce around in the turbulence, gaining velocity until it’s almost hard to tell the difference. One mocks the other, as if in a competition to determine which is more painful. In reality, they just play into each other’s hands. I grappled with both while caring for my mother during her battle with Alzheimer’s, facing my ongoing struggle with depression while grieving her absence, even when she was still very much alive.
I didn’t photograph Mom very often during the long months I spent watching her disappear. Despite a disconcerting lack of self-awareness, a side effect of the disease that eventually took her life, the camera made her self-conscious, and I couldn’t bring myself to subject her to that gaze. Instead, I pointed the camera in the other direction, using it to process the world outside our tiny bubble of meals and medication management. Gingerly at first, I began to tiptoe through the landmines crowding my emotional landscape simply by turning around; the earth was still spinning, even as I sat by her bed, perfectly still. I documented my tiny discoveries meticulously, almost scientifically, greedily hoarding every nuance of life and death in what felt like a state of desperation; an attempt to freeze life until I was free to actually see it... as if I might forget, like she had, how to experience the world.
