…to have and to hold…

I’m holding the hand of my father and looking at the oxygen tube in his nose. On the beds around him figures with strange swollen heads and half shaved off hair lay whilst they make incoherent sounds to relatives, who in turn, make small child-like sounds back to them. I look at their strange swollen heads and the staples and stitching that run over them and think to myself whoever was inside has gone and perhaps is never coming back.

Ten minutes later, though, when talking to the relatives in the waiting room I tell them, or at least one, that everything will work out. A red faced man with a fixed grin that acts as a levy to stop his eyes from overflowing, nods his head and talks of signs of improvement; as his son plays on his father’s mobile phone and his daughter, is lost, head down, in a magazine.

I know he doesn’t believe this, not really, he knows his wife – as he knew her – isn’t coming back. But what can he do? He tells me that he’s only an agency worker and he hasn’t been to work for a week, he mentions the mortgage and the costs of being here and already I think that all that you have known and believed to be is no more.

I’m lucky, in contrast my father is in control of his faculties he doesn’t have a head injury, I can sit and talk to my relative and I know that he is still there.

But I hate hospitals.

I hate having to walk through the curtain and see everything that my mind tries to run away from. That the body is weak, fragile and will fail; and that death will come to us all; but then you comfort yourself with the thoughts that if you can just get through this, just get through today it will be OK and I’ll worry about tomorrow when it comes.

What has this to do with photography you ask yourself? A few years ago I debated with a friend the ethics of another photographer photographing his father in hospital. How wrong and exploitative we thought this was..and perhaps still is. But sitting next to my father the other day, I took out a small compact camera and quickly took his photograph, wondering to myself when would I do this again and then put the camera back into my pocket.

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