To go to sleep.........and never wake up again.
This is a photo document of my father. For almost a year I would weekly visit my father and take care of him. I would go to his home in Bunde but in the beginning of 2016 he was taken to hospital. There he was diagnosed with lung cancer and mall nutrition. And so finally my father went from the hospital in Maastricht to a nursing home in Zeist. To go to sleep and never wake up again was his ideal way of passing away.
In 2015 it was clear to me and my brother and sister that our father was not capable of taking care of his own. For years we tried to get him into a nursing home nearer to where we lived but my father would have nothing of that. And thus began for me a weekly journey from Amsterdam to Bunde, a small village in the south of the Netherlands.
Every time I was with my father I decided to take a or more pictures. I realised I had very few pictures of my father. While he stayed in the south of the Netherlands, after the divorce with my mother, I moved to the west of the Netherlands. Although our relationship was fine I did not see him often. Seeing him getting so ill and vulnerable I knew I had to make up for all the time I had not spent with him. And so I began to photograph my father. It started with the occasional portrait. But by the time we were both comfortable with me taking pictures of him my father had become far more weaker then I had realised and it was very difficult for him to move around. So most of the photographs are of him sitting in his comfortable chair facing the television set. Later on he was not able to sit up straight and het would only lie in his bed. So sitting in his chair or lying in his bed I would photograph him. Surrounded by his books of which he had so many. Later on when he was not able to read anymore he would watch tv. And when even watching tv became to tiresome he would close his eyes and only listen to the sound of the program he was watching. At the end of his life when the pain of the bedsores became to much to bare and everything else would wear him out he often would say to me that he would like to fall asleep, a deep sleep and never wake up again from that sleep. My father was afraid of dying but he also was to tired to live on. In may 2016 my father did pass away in his sleep, or as they would say in his nursing home; he passed through the gates of death.
