“Well, we have to go back five years to the beginning of the pandemic,” says photographer Becky Wilkes, recalling how she came to create the exhibit Til Death Do Us Part. “And actually a couple of months prior to the beginning of the pandemic, my parents were both experiencing… a lot of medical issues. And daddy was administered to the hospital with congestive heart failure, and the day before he was to be released, mom had a stroke. And three weeks later… they spent time together in rehab and then mom was discharged to live independently in their apartment, and dad was discharged to hospice care with this congestive heart failure.”
Wilkes and her siblings found themselves making frequent trips to Waco to care for their almost-90-year-old parents, and then the looming threat of a global pandemic made an already-difficult situation worse. “And then COVID hit and we were locked out of the facility,” Wilkes remembers, “and very quickly we realized – I mean, within 24 hours we realized – that they would not survive the pandemic with their medical situation. And we decided to bring them to our home to live with us. I had to set up hospice care and also… learned this myriad of pill preparation for my parents and what their needs were.”
Wilkes was expecting to see her father in the same state he’d been in while in hospice in Waco, she says. “He had been laying in a bed for the prior three weeks, not getting up at all. And he's delivered to my house with mom and with my brother and sister, and they walk in with their walkers, and daddy never sits down. And lo and behold, this story unfolds where, having been separated for about a month prior to coming to my house, mom and dad never leave each other's side. They sleep [and] spoon together, they sit right next to each other on the sofa. They walk with each other up and down the driveway. And It's just so sweet, so cute, so new love.”
She’d already started snapping some cell phone photos to share with her siblings, but seeing her parents together again, with what seemed like a renewed sense of love and togetherness, Wilkes decided to capture more and better photos. “And then I did have a conversation with them very quickly and I requested permission to photograph them,” she says. “And they agreed wholeheartedly that I could take any pictures I wanted. The journey just continued much longer than we ever anticipated, and I continued to photograph them sleeping together, showering, reading, walking… very simple, mundane things that we were all doing together, but it was just this opportunity to capture the lives of two people that had been given a new lease on life. We anticipated daddy's death within weeks, and he ended up living nine months. It was a long, beautiful time together. But then losing them, of course, was hard. Losing daddy first and then mom two months later was really hard.”
The resulting photography exhibit, Til Death Do Us Part, chronicles that last year of her parents’ lives. “I didn't know how long the project could be and of course, as I started photographing for months, for several months, I ended up with so many photographs that I realized that there was the potential for an exhibition,” Wilkes says, “What I didn't know at the time was whether anybody would be interested in the material beyond our family. And what I found was that it's hugely connecting to all people that have ever loved or experienced loss. Which is most people. The story ultimately ends in their death and our understanding of their death. But the story is really about their living. And, that's really… that's really beautiful.”
'Til Death Do Us Part' is on display at the Georgetown Art Center through August 3, with a community resource forum on the elderly and their caretaker on July 26 at 2:00 pm.
