From the Archives: Mema and Emerson, April 2008

 I’ve been making a personal project of going back and categorizing and organizing old photos. Today I came  across these two images of my grandmother (Mema) holding my niece Emerson and the photos took me instantly back to the Spring afternoon when they were taken. I was an inexperienced photographer in April 2008, and the images aren’t perfect by any means.  But that doesn’t matter. I love that I have these photographs because they are some of the last I took of her where she still looks like herself.

 Mema is in the more advanced stages of Alzheimers now  and hasn’t looked like I remember her in a couple of years. Her amazing wit and personality has been wiped from her face. You don’t realize the imact that a person’s intellect and spark has on their features until it disappears.

So when I saw these, It was like seeing her again.

Sometimes there are photos that you know will be important as you take them. Other times a photograph’s importance surprises you. In this case, I would be lying if I said I didn’t know that I would value these images someday. I actually remember the exact moment I clicked the shutter. And I remember knowing that I was going to be really, really happy to have them one day.

And as long as I am being completely honest, one of the reasons I remember these photos and this moment so clearly is that there was another image, taken just before these two, where Mema had a faraway, glazed-over look in her eyes that simply terrified me. Suddenly, I could literally see what the future was bringing, and I knew I wasn’t going to like it. ( I suppose the flip side of photography’s power is that sometimes a photo reveals things we would rather not see.) She had been diagnosed with Alzheimers for about a year at that point, and we had all noticed changes. But she still retained what we thought of as “Mema” – we hadn’t lost her personality yet.

So that afternoon, I clicked again and was relieved that her expression came back.  And right here, in these two photos, she looks exactly the way I want to remember her –  exactly like I still picture her in my mind’s eye.

I know, it sounds cliché. But looking at these two photos reinforces the power of my job and my art. I love that even though my niece (the baby in this photograph) will never have memories of Mema’s incredibly loving and vibrant personality, she has this photo that shows how loved she was by this amazing woman, and how happy she made her during the time they spent together.

These photos also remind me of the value of photographing the people in my life regularly and in the moment – because moments are fleeting and our memories are unreliable and time is oh-so short.