The day my father died (23th of August 2022), my mother lost touch with reality. Almost overnight, she began behaving strangely. She heard voices, saw people who were not there, and seemed to lose all sense of time. Sometimes she was an eight-year-old girl; at other times, a teenager. When the psychiatrist came, he diagnosed her with Alzheimer’s disease.
Her condition deteriorated rapidly. She could no longer live alone, so we moved her into a care home. Within months, her cognitive decline accelerated, and she seemed to be living more in another world than in ours.
She still had brief flashes of lucidity. Then her language began to unravel. Coherent sentences became increasingly rare. At first, there might be one meaningful connection a day; then one a week; eventually, only once every few months. The last coherent sentence she ever said to me was: “I am afraid of the clouds.” That sentence became the starting point for this photographic project, in which I bring together with my sister archival images, photographs I have taken myself, and, above all, the images I receive every day from my mother’s caregivers.
This process has led me to question memory and what remains when memory begins to disappear. What remains of us when language, recognition, and the ability to locate ourselves in time gradually fade? I have also begun to think about the weight of childhood, and about the traces of our earliest memories that might remain within us, even when everything else seems to disappear.
Patricia Abarca de la Fuente 