I never really photographed family, never with the intention for the pictures to become public. My family’s business was always to remain private only among the four of us and no on else. Even with my brother’s cardiac arrest and subsequent brain trauma causing his cognitive issues, we were to take care of the problem on our own and with just medical help, no psychiatry, no therapy and no strangers. Being incredibly introverted, my photographs consisted of the landscape. I would wander out to the dunes of the National Seashore, or would explore the beaches of Truro out on Cape Cod and make pictures of an abandoned landscape. In order to break out of my comfort zone and to practice my skills on a photographic genre that I found compelling, I started photographing people in the cityscape, and portraiture which in turn lead me to narrative street photography and the documentary. I decided I needed a project to pursue and since I was spending more and more of my time taking care of my mother, I thought there might be a project in her care. Not only did it force me to make pictures of people it made me have a good look at myself and my family and for the first time be able to reveal our chronicle from my perspective.

The name I have for this undertaking is Coming Home Again and Again. After the loss of my dad and the realization that my mom was in decline so I’ve returned home to take care of my mother who was diagnosed with dementia and my brother who has had cognitive issues for the past 25 or so years. It was my coming home to the house I grew up in, over and over again and again. The project was going to be a documentary about my mother’s diagnosis and my becoming her caregiver but has grown and evolved into something much more. It has become more a story about us and our lives together. Hers, an immigrant looking for a better life in the late 1950s, me, a first generation Greek American with one foot on this continent and one in the old country.

It's also a story of mental illness, hers and mine. We both suffer from major depression and anxiety, mine, thankfully, is under control, hers not so much. My depression was diagnosed about ten years ago when I finally decided to seek treatment. I knew deep down that there had to be a better way to live than what I was experiencing. I was self medicating with alcohol, but that would never last and would send me on a downwardspiral. Now that my disease is under control I can see it in my mom, major depression and anxiety being hereditary, I can understand where I I possibly got it. One thing I did learn about the disease and myself was that you have to want to seek treatment in order for it to be successful. Mom, a proud, strong Greek woman, never, to my knowledge sought help. Dementia is a funny thing though. She talks a bit more about what she’s feeling now. Both of us would shut down when the depression would hit. Silence would be then norm. When asked “what’s wrong” the answer was always “nothing, I’m fine.” Now she will tell me about her sadness that she can’t explain. A little comedy helps so I joke with her and she mimics me, when the tragedy sets in I stay with her until it passes. The dementia seems to cover her depression sometimes, she doesn’t remember to be sad. She does stay quiet now, satisfied with just having the me there to keep her company. I am lucky that she does remember who I am.

This is also a story about aging. Her aging, but my aging too. A few years back my husband and I held a surprise eightieth birthday party for mom. Her birthday is September 12 and we asked my cousins if we could use their home to put up a tent and have the party outside because our home in the city was too small to accommodate our large family. Mom remembers that party to this day, she is the first of her siblings to turn eighty, her older sister having died years ago aged 42 from breast cancer. Mom is eighty-seven now and as I’m fifty-five, I can’t help but think that that was the age my father was when I threw him his first surprise birthday party. Yes, we can look at the photographs and see all the changes in the physical appearance of our faces and our bodies, but how do we really present to the world? If my father were alive today he would be 88, (he died of leukemia in 2005) and I wonder what he would look like physically but more so how would he present to me. As I look at the pictures I’vetaken and presented of mom thus far, I am aware of the editing process, of what is to be included and excluded, that the narrative you are seeing is a biased one of a son trying to be an objective documentarian, but I also want this to present as a kind of personal message and final gift of to us her since I did not create such a documentary about my father.

As part of my research, I spoke with a few artists who use photography as their medium to document their loved ones struggles with dementia. I got advice from working in abstractions to full on straight documentation of daily life. I thought long and hard about all the advice and studied the work all these talented and dedicated artists had created and forged my path with mom in this series of images collected here.