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The Memory Floor - GEOFFREY ANSEL AGRONS

Lens Magazine

April 2022

After over four years in the San Francisco Bay area, I returned to the east coast in 2015 to assist in the care of my aging parents. Unfortunately, their physical and cognitive decline proceeded to advance inexorably. Separately, each spent the end of their lives in facilities dedicated to caring for residents with dementia, most commonly the Alzheimer's type. They received excellent support from a dedicated and compassionate staff, and each, in turn, entered hospice until their death.

The Memory Floor - GEOFFREY ANSEL AGRONS

Although facilities dedicated to the care of degenerative brain disorders tend to be named euphemistically (A Place for Mom;Life Guidance Neighborhood; The Village), the disease is exquisitely cruel, relentless, and indifferent to sentimentality. I was a physician before I became a photographer. I imagined I was no stranger to death and dying. Nevertheless, I could not shake the lingering sense that my unbidden and honest emotional responses to my disappearing family included feelings that were taboo.

Tenderness coexisted with body horror and existential terror of my own inevitable demise. Through the lens, I hoped to capture my parents' changing world on my own terms. I sought to confront the paradox of my receding presence within that world, the poignant erasure of memory, and the welter of my conflicting responses to our inevitable dissolution and decay.

This story is from the April 2022 edition of Lens Magazine.

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