Membrane
My sister, Marta, and I spent a week emptying our childhood home at the end of 2022. Having older parents has meant we've had to experience some things far earlier than most people do. Around the same time someone told me that they couldn't imagine not having their parents' help now, in their forties. That thought had never really occurred to me before.
I, the eldest, was then 38.
Marta and I were lucky to have the help of Zeizy, who was our parents’ housekeeper for the previous 5 years. While most of these photographs trace absence and stillness, there was energy in the house; people coming and going, picking up books, evaluating artworks, fixing leaks.
The year after I moved out of my childhood home, our parents refurbished and expanded it. For reasons my sister and I were never to understand, they chose cold, slippery leather sofas for the living room. There’s one sofa, however, that has its place in the dining room and isn’t made of cold, slippery leather; it is uniquely warm and comfortable. It’s the sofa my mother used to sit in, obsessively doing her sudoku puzzles. Surrounded by walls lined with paintings, sitting next to her magazine holder overflowing with sudoku booklets, my mum would fill out her puzzles in pencil so she could then erase them and re-do them until the paper started thinning, giving into its slow torture. It must have been a lonesome experience to sit in her corner of the warm, comfortable sofa doing sudokus over and over again, the only one aware of her first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
This photo was made somewhere between seeing our dad's library being emptied of a life of 89 years collecting books and going out for some delicious food, something we prioritised in the middle of all of what was going on. I'm glad we did, maybe that's how we got through that whole week without one single fight.