The More You Lose, The More You Love

Over the course of fifteen years, I have been photographing my now 81-year-old mother, Elisabeth, documenting not only her transformation through aging and dementia, but the strength and complexity of our bond.What began as a way of preserving her presence became a long, unfolding conversation between us: a dance between memory and forgetting, visibility and disappearance, mother and daughter.

Each time I return to my parents' apartment in Germany, I enter a ritual. My father, her caregiver, gently steps aside. In our pocket of time, my mother and I create. She has always had a love affair with the camera—its gaze, its ability to express what can’t be said.Now, when memory is frayed and time elusive, something in her lights up in front of the lens.The present moment becomes tangible.Conscious.Real. Suddenly, she is there.

These images are a blink of thousands of photographs made over the years.The gaze shifts from myself to my mother, us moving between the roles of photographer and photographed.The photographs reveal not only her shifts, but mine.As roles blur and stories invert, the daughter becomes the mother.The mother becomes the child. Grief and laughter braided together.

As I witness my mother’s transformation, I try not to see her for who she was or cling to unresolved pains of the past, but to see who she is in each moment before me.I try to meet her there, in that space where we talk about the current weather under which we can still be together.

Dressing up remains a form of joy for my mother.When I visit,we sort her closet and she puts on a fashion show, strutting the runway of her hallway.We let go of garments that once extended her elegance, making room for simplicity and clarity.I often inherit her clothes, inhabiting her past and presence. 

My mother sheds with each breath.With each exhale she becomes more present, living in feeling, in a space where time does not exist.She is teaching me presence and the patience it takes to let time go.She is teaching me that emotions are like currents, ripples rising and riding through us and to us, from us and beyond us.She is teaching me about love and the art of loving.

These photographs are an honouring, a search and a letting go.For Elisabeth.For the deepening mystery of her.For the self I am becoming in her fading light.Like the myth of Demeter and Persephone—a daughter descending into the shadowed underworld of her mother’s forgetting, and a mother who, in moments of lucidity, returns like spring.