The Long Goodbye

“The Long Goodbye”

The Long Goodbye is a photographic portrait series that documents and honors my mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease. Through these images, I confront the slow, painful erosion of memory and identity that this illness inflicts—not only on those who suffer from it, but on the loved ones who witness it.

Each photograph is an act of holding on, of bearing a witness, of trying to preserve moments that are slipping away in real time. The camera becomes a bridge between presence and absence, clarity and confusion, the person my mother was and the woman she is becoming. There is beauty here, and sorrow. Intimacy, and distance.

This work is deeply personal, but I know it echoes the quiet grief and enduring love felt by many. It is an attempt to create space for reflection: on aging, on caregiving, on the human dignity that persists even as memory fades.

It is, in the end, a love letter — to my mother, and to the slow, sacred act of saying goodbye.