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Friday Slide Show: An Absence in the Air
28 February 2025
The other day we scrolled through all the thumbnails of the slide shows we've produced for Photo Corners. That would be 581 thumbnails (but it went fast).
It gave us the famous feeling of our life flashing before our eyes. So many wonderful memories of the places we've been with the people we care about, the things we've seen that amused us, the days of our life. The stuff that was important to us.
So when it came time to work on this week's show, we had to sit ourselves down and think about the one most important thing going on in our life right now.
We've posted some 380 long entries about it elsewhere to keep family members informed but we rarely mention the situation here.
Joyce has been in a nursing home diagnosed with dementia since November. Eating very little, she's lost 53 lbs. in that time and she can't walk more than a few feet before the fear of falling takes over and she sits back down in the wheelchair trailing her.
Which means she hasn't been home for months.
Before the nursing home bed became available, we did try to bring her home from the hospital a couple of times, the last being Halloween. But it didn't work out. She was unable to get out of the chair at home the EMTs put her in. So the advice nurse we spoke to told us to call 911 to take her to the ER. Again.
We work with the nursing home staff every day. Arriving in time for lunch, we encourage her to eat. We weigh her daily. We take her to the gym to work on the various equipment she knows and watch the chair exercise videos. We join the Restorative Nurse Assistants helping her to walk down the hallways.
But the impediment is dementia. And while she's being medicated to stall the progression of her decline, she hasn't improved and, we are coming to realize, isn't likely to.
Which brings us to this slide show. It illustrates her absence in the house.
It begins with the staircase she couldn't climb on Halloween. Then it shows her laptop closed on her desk. We see the piano whose keys are covered and her chair, padded with pillows where she would sit all day.
The money tree friends sent when she returned from one of her surgeries is struggling under my care. And her place at the table is not set. The wooden roses a nephew once gave her still sit on the mantel beneath a photo of us we took with the Nikon we bought in 1981.
And then there is the bedroom, her side of the bed brighter for being nearer the window.
There's more to each image than that brief description provides but that's typical of photos of any home. We know, for example, more about the pictures on the bedroom wall than you'd care to know.
The images may have been more vibrant in color but presenting them in black-and-white echoes the absence we feel.
Which brings us to a final thought about all this.
White on a visit to Alfred Stieglitz's gallery once upon a time, Minor White wondered if he had what it took to become a serious photographer.
"Have you ever been in love?" Stieglitz asked him. White said he had.
"Then you can photograph," Stieglitz said.
We are just beginning to understand what he meant.
