Photography as a Lifeline: Coping with Alzheimer’s and Loss
My mother reading a magazine
When my mother passed away in December of 2024, it came as a blessing. Deprived of her own will, identity, and memories, she had not really been the mother I’d known all my life. I am the youngest of my parent’s three children and had an especially close bond with my mom. She was my protector, my comforter, my very foundation. So when she began exhibiting signs of dementia around 2015, the world I had always known began to crack and fall apart. Finding myself struggling to cope, I eventually found comfort in photography.
In the spring of 2016, I began to experience weird physical symptoms. I had always had episodes of what I’d always called “sugar rushes.” I would start to feel weak, my body would shake, and eventually I’d get the sweats. The one remedy that always worked for me was cheese, crackers, and a glass of milk. Don’t ask me why, and even doctors told me that if I found a solution, then to keep with it. I had been tested several times for diabetes or hypoglycemia over the years but they always came back negative.
These new symptoms were different, though. I wasn’t experiencing the acute symptoms of a sugar rush, but rather what I can only describe as a low level humming or vibration throughout my entire body. Surely, I was experiencing low blood sugar? I purchased testing kits from the drugstore and poked my finger often to test my sugar levels, which always came back as normal.
Then things got worse. In the middle of one night, when I had been fast asleep, I suddenly bolted upright in bed because I couldn’t catch my breath. I thought I was having a heart attack. I woke my wife and told her what was going on. I was hyperventilating, I had trouble breathing, but also had all this energy and wanted to get out of bed and sprint around the bedroom. She told me it sounded like I was having a panic attack.
Panic attack? Me? What the fuck? My wife instructed me to lay down and take deep breaths. She held my hand and told me I had adrenaline coursing through my veins and just needed to try and relax until it flushed itself out of my system. Sure enough, after several minutes, I began to calm down and eventually fell back asleep. These would occur periodically over the course of the next few months. Never during the day, only when I was dead asleep. Fucking strange.
My normal doctor, who couldn’t figure out what was happening to me, decided to take a position in administration and announced he had stopped seeing patients. Fine. It happens. I searched among available doctors, picked one out, and made an appointment.
On the first visit with my new physician, after the initial banter was out of the way, he asked me to describe my symptoms. As soon as I was done—and without missing a beat—he said, “You have anxiety.”
Anxiety? Me? What the fuck? That was something other people had. I was always the happy-go-lucky guy. The roll-with-the-punches guy. I didn’t get anxiety (but at least that would explain the panic attacks).
With a prescription for Ativan in hand, I went home and told my wife and kids about my diagnosis. They pretty much had the same reaction as me: a collective shrug of the shoulders and looks of confusion.
Later in the middle of the night—always in the middle of the night with me—I sat up in bed and blurted out loud, “My mom!”
My startled and groggy wife said, “What’s happening?”
I turned and explained to her I knew where the anxiety was coming from. It was from my mother’s dementia. I was losing my mother and I didn’t know how to deal with it, hence the anxiety.
For whatever reason, coming to that realization cleared up my physical symptoms almost immediately. I would still wake up with panic attacks occasionally, but they reduced in frequency and eventually stopped altogether. However, what followed was even worse: the breakdown of my mental tranquility.
I began to experience periods of anxiousness where I felt compelled to get up and walk around the house. It was different than a panic attack because it wasn’t a physical hormone causing the symptoms but rather the spiraling of my mind. I had the Ativan but I was afraid to take it for fear of becoming addicted. My wife suggested I get out of the house and go for a walk.
I did one better. I grabbed my camera and drove out to Folsom Lake. I didn’t have a plan, I was just going with the flow. I drove to the very end of the road inside the State Park to a place called Beek’s Bight. After parking the car, I grabbed my camera and just walked around. The fresh air and sunshine began to calm my mind. Then I noticed how the light was illuminating a clump of large granite boulders and I snapped away.
For as long as I can remember, I had always been the one with the camera. From when I was a young boy, I loved to take pictures. In the 1970’s it was with a 110 camera with the rotating flash cubes. Most of my pictures then, and throughout my young adult life, were snapshots. It wasn’t until 1999 when a couple of friends at work urged me to get an SLR film camera that I began to take photography more seriously.
It was an on again, off again, activity for me, though. I was always chasing trends or trying to emulate what other photographers were doing. I didn’t occupy my own space, instead I relinquished my art to others. No wonder I kept putting the camera down for extended periods. I could never be satisfied because I was always trying to be something I wasn’t.
The pictures I took that day at Folsom Lake weren’t memorable—save for the fact that I took them. It wasn’t the pictures themselves I remember but rather the calmness the act of photographing had on me. I had since heard someone say on a photography podcast: creativity was the enemy of nihilism. From that day onward I began to shoot for myself and not others. And I also realized it was the act of taking pictures, and not the pictures themselves, that provided me with solace.
Over the course of the next few years, I mourned the steady loss of my mother. Eventually, the woman who gave birth to me, and raised me, and loved me, disappeared. When my father passed in 2020, my mother’s mental downward spiral accelerated. What was left was basically an adult infant who needed her basic needs met and not much else. My siblings and I were on our own.
There’s still a lingering sense of guilt for not visiting her often in her final days. Seeing her that condition was difficult and I had a hard time facing the reality of it. Thankfully, with each passing day, the guilt and sadness is replaced with loving memories of a woman who dedicated her life to her children.
I love you, Mom.
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