A Few Hours In The Life Of A 92-Year-Old Woman

This series of photographs explores many concepts: soul, love, suffering, courage, fear, hope, faith, individual, family, intimacy. The series is an attempt to show something about the value of human life, an effort to understand what it means to deal with the experience of imminent death. The pictures depict a few hours in the life of an old woman – my grandmother, Maria Suditu, aged 92 –, during her struggle with a crisis caused by complications from diabetes. The core of eight photos of the series was occasioned by a discussion I had on the phone with my mother, on the evening of Friday, February 24, 2017, when she asked me to come home, to Brăila, as soon as possible, as my grandmother’s condition had worsened and she had insisted to see me. My only option was to take the first, early morning train to Brăila and come back to Bucharest in the same day: a sleepover would have been impossible, as my old room became my grandmother’s, and I was expected at work on Monday. After a journey that lasted almost 4 hours, during which I thought about all of this situation, I arrived home around noon. It made me sad to see how much grandmother had changed since my last visit. She seemed another person: a helpless child, in terrible pain, full of wrinkles, bedridden, barely able to speak. The most striking aspect was her transfigured face. Her eyes expressed an immense suffering, even despair, but also joy to see me again. I was glad that she could recognize me and felt lucky that most of the time she was lucid, even though I did not always understand what she was trying to say. While I took the pictures, the camera functioned as a shield, allowing me to concentrate and maintain a certain level of detachment. I was however overwhelmed by emotion in those moments when I left the camera aside and simply sat next to her, holding her hand, trying to talk to her, showing her pictures of the house where she lived most of her life before moving in our home, arranging her pillows and her blanket, straighten up her headscarf and even a loose sock. At about 5pm, when the time came to leave, after kissing goodbye, not knowing if I will ever see her alive, all I managed to do…to say…was: ”Pull my beard! Stronger! Much stronger!”, and she acted accordingly. The other two photos I chose to introduce in series, even if they were made before those eight, in different occasions, give my story a sense of completion. Their selection at the beginning, respectively the end of the series, has at least two merits: on the one hand, they create pillars of support, on the other hand, they put in the right light the message I tried to convey. The first one was taken on my previous visit to Brăila, 6 months before, and it represents both a term of comparison and a metaphor of the rapid decline. The last one was taken also in Brăila, 2 years ago, from the balcony of our apartment, and is a symbol of faith put to the test. In this age of technology and internet, where everything runs at a breathtaking speed, when everything is done in a hurry, I invite everyone to pay more attention, more time to experiences related to death. And here I have in mind not only the death of beloved ones – be they people or animals – but also our own death. It is important, I think, not to neglect the depth, the solemnity, the majesty of death. My point is that without death there is no life. This is my tribute to grandmother’s life. This is the expression of my gratitude for my mother’s sacrifice. This is part of my life.