(Dis)ease

(Dis)ease is a chronicle of daily FaceTime conversations with my mother as we navigated the last year of her life, coincidentally the year of the pandemic.

It began in the summer of 2020. While most were sheltering in place during the frantic height of the pandemic, I spent a good portion of the year traveling back and forth from California to Southeastern Pennsylvania to care for my ailing mother following open-heart surgery. Our relationship between those visits consisted of daily FaceTime conversations where I watched her image slip further down the screen towards the unknown, finally ending in early August of 2021 with a final visit together before her passing.

I began documenting our daily conversations, hers relating the vagaries of her weakening body and mine exposing the natural world beyond our confinements. The isolation, distance, and despair of 2020 were surreal, and as the year progressed, the acknowledgment that her end was near made the experience more abstract. Recursive images inside themselves, repeatedly repeating infinitely as each day transitioned to the next with little to no change other than her getting smaller and weaker and seeming farther and farther away. My mother was stuck in a place she didn’t want to be, filling a tiny screen that contained her once bigger-than-life personality. And I was stuck, unable to be with her due to the vicissitudes of Covid. This is how we spent our time.

FaceTime was a window that encouraged us outside ourselves. As her final days approached, I came to consider it a mirror, reflecting my mortality to me. It was no longer a window shared between us but a portal to our shared future.