Sue Steward and her mother Jean Photograph: Sue Steward
When Susan Sontag died of cancer in 2004, her lover Annie Leibovitz chose the clothes she would be buried in, and took photographs of her wearing them while lying in a funeral parlour. "I was in a trance when I took the pictures of her lying there," she wrote, not defensively, but pre-empting the criticisms of voyeurism - which did come. "I just did it." What caught and held my eye among those death images in her book, A Photographer's Life, were the close-ups of Sontag's hands, clasped across her chest. Significantly, they were the hands of a writer who wrote by hand, words which touched people unknown to her.
For her previous book, Women, Leibovitz had included a portrait of her own mother, unusually unsmiling and staring straight into the camera. Her parents hadn't liked the photograph, but I find it a powerful and revealing "interior" portrait. Sontag had reminded the photographer that her mother was the first woman she knew - a statement obvious but profound; the skin-to-skin relationship between mother and child is the first connection with another being, a woman, the mother. I had mused on mother-daughter relationships often during the three long years I sat beside hospital beds and care-home armchairs, as my own mother grappled with the closing down of her life. She died a year ago: sweetly and softly, while sitting in a chair in the lounge of her residential care home just after the tea trolley has passed by. A quiet and mundane departure, as she wanted; a few minutes earlier, she'd dispatched my sister, Alison, to her room to check if she needed more tights. It's perhaps too easy to interpret that as an unconscious attempt to protect her daughter from witnessing the moment.
Mum needed to die; she was exhausted by the strokes and falls and leg ulcers - and what was barely acknowledged by the professionals, depression and a kind of existential angst which crushed her gregarious, optimistic personality from the day she arrived, unexpectedly, in the residential care home. Many fellow residents accepted their one-way ticket and some lived in demented denial, but others, like Mum, suffered terribly. "Depression in an old person? I've never heard of that before," laughed one of the usually helpful carers, when I suggested the reason for her newly withdrawn behaviour. One afternoon, as she dozed on her bed, the GP told Alison and me that Mum had very little time left and we needed to discuss end-of-life plans with her. I am convinced that she overheard the sentence. From then, she retreated, simply closed her eyes and shut down, lying in bed for days, reluctantly accepting sips of water and fortified drinks, but never speaking or opening her eyes. We kept watch and waited for her "to go".
And in the hours I spent alone with her, I studied her face, held her hand, made distracting notes, thought of photographing her, talked to her. Then, out of the blue, one morning, a carer phoned to say that she was eating Weetabix in the dining room and smiling.
I decided that she'd probably, unconsciously, been processing then accepting the news of her fate, on her terms, and the only way she could in such a public space was to cut out. Decisions made, she woke, bright and friendly and hungry and decided to go to the end exuding joyfulness. But the doctor then prescribed antidepressants to make sure the mood lasted, and she smiled so blissfully and was so sensually alert (even with one blind eye, two deaf ears and two semi-paralysed hands) to the pleasures of birds and colours, my latest jewellery and news from friends, that I wondered if they were trying her on ecstasy. Though still physically dependent, she'd taken back control of herself. And sometimes it almost felt like she was now mothering us again.
The last time I saw my mother, she was waving goodbye to me across the lounge as I left. She had asked when I would be back and I said, "Two weeks"- the longest gap I'd left it in months, and instead of a look of disappointment, she grinned and said, "Oh that's good." I bent and kissed her and she pinned me with her still dazzling blue eyes. Her stiff "good" arm stretched into an awkward wave as she mimed kisses to me, but, as I turned to go, she instructed me softly, "Kiss me!" and I turned back. "I've already kissed you, Mum, but I'll gladly kiss you again," and did, holding her hand. Ten days later, I arrived in that same lounge, four hours after her death. She was in her bedroom and I was faced by a scene I'd envisioned so often, seen generically in films and read in books. I'd imagined it peopled by the ones now standing around her bed - except my sister, who had found her "asleep" in her chair, had gone home by then for relief. Confusingly, this stage set of her room had somehow changed: my brother and sister-in-law stood mute, two of the kindest carers wept, and Mum lay partly under the covers, her hands exposed. She was wearing the sea-green dress and blue cardie embroidered with flowers that she died in, and which we decided without argument to bury her in.
My mother's face resembled the one we'd sat next to and stared at during the long days when we expected death: the same hollow and closed eyes, relaxed brow and folded hands. I was temporarily deceived into almost nudging her awake, but something unimaginably primal and complex in my brain had kicked in: this is the real thing, I thought, she's dead. Of course, it took only a split second in that room to know that truth, but not to really know it. Suddenly my voice took on an alien life of its own and filled the room with howls. I leant over her but felt a forcefield around her; she was in a different realm from us now, one I didn't understand. We were here, she was here, but where was she? I'd missed that moment of transference I'd so badly wanted to witness - her "passing", but, for the first time, understood how that word is so apt.
The others discreetly left the room to wait for me. In the car on the way from the station, I had checked my camera was charged. I'd discussed with my friend Anne, several times in recent weeks, the fact that I wanted to photograph my mother in death. I couldn't articulate why, but our conversations gave me permission regardless. Now, sitting beside her, stroking her silky white hair, kissing her forehead, I pulled the camera out of my bag. She wouldn't have liked it; she'd probably find it obscene, and certainly wouldn't have understood. But how could I have explained when I didn't know why I felt the need to do this? I kissed her forehead, moist and cool, and then, bizarrely, thought of the organic procedures of death; the internal factory that would now be working overtime to effect total shutdown. I sniffed her forehead, curious to know the smell of death but, thankfully, smelt only her hair, the smell she stored inside the hats and scarves she left behind, and which I now wear. I got off the bed, took out the camera and stood up, looking over my shoulders towards the closed door, as if about to commit an obscene act. I was nervous a carer might come in and find me in flagrante. I moved close to her, talking as I clicked, standing over her face. And then I stood up and stared at her hands: they were what I most wanted to preserve. I took one in my own, trying to warm it with my breath like I did when we'd sat close together, talking. It always reminded me of calming a frightened bird.
During her last years, Mum had started taking my arm to cross a road, grabbing my hand like a child, and eventually, when sitting close, letting me hold hers in my own. Her fingers were small and pointed and would have been elegant if they hadn't served years of domestic drudgery. She did housework until her last day in her own home, and in this final place, the hands grew smooth and beautiful, but increasingly useless. One day, I found her wearing nail polish and asked if she had a date; she giggled and splayed her fingers like a teenager, regarding them with detached amusement. Like Susan Sontag, and just as incongruously, she was buried with polished nails.
I took the shot of her hand and threw the camera into my bag and sat down again, stroking her. But I was agitated now, I felt tainted: I'd got what I wanted from her without understanding what I would do with the images, or why I wanted them. At that last sight of my mother, I remember fearing that my photographs were voyeuristic; had I behaved like a Weegee? But I shoved such thoughts from my mind and turned and kissed her goodbye for the last time.
Liebovitz had said she had to do it... "It's what I do." Maybe wanting to photograph my mother was partly to defy the taboo in our culture against making death part of life. The notoriously sentimental Victorians were surprisingly unsqueamish about it. Early on, they harnessed photography to "postmortem photographs" of their dead children and babies, who were laid out wearing beautiful robes and surrounded by flowers, for the photographer to immortalise their short lives. Cards bearing the photograph of the child apparently sleeping were kept on mantelpieces and sent to relatives unable to make the funeral, aids to help deal with grief in a society not given to emotional expression. During the last year, I've wondered about that need to hold on to something of my mother in death, and am now deeply comforted by having the images I shot without realising what I was doing. They are possibly more precious than the material things, and even more than the family snaps of her smiling at birthdays and weddings or chatting with her friend Kath in her beloved garden. What I possess are photographic memento mori, and as I look into her death face on my computer screen, I treasure the power of photographs to transmit a three-dimensional reality which genuinely conveys her. I can feel the textures and contours of her face and hands, their bones and scars, her history, and the silkiness of her whispy hair. Then one night, streaming through the internet while I wrote this story, I found a moving letter, written in 1870, by parishoner Flora A Windeyer to Revd John Blomfield on the death of her child: "What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes."
Nine months after my mother's death, I walked into a gallery in Amsterdam called FOAM, and was greeted by a poster for an exhibition by the Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi, intriguingly titled Mother's. A winter-sun-filled room contained large, mostly black-and-white prints of Miyako's late mother's intimate clothing and possessions, and close-ups of her skin and one breast. A detached, artful outpouring of memory, it overwhelmed me with its familiarity. Tears flowed and I was transfixed by the correspondence of her transfer of grief on to ordinary items - petticoats, bloomer knickers, lipsticks - with mine. The lacy, black underwear hung limply and transparent against the light, while the white cotton, thin-strapped vest of my mother's, held up, reveals the slight billowing of the fabric created by her breasts, like the mould for a cast of her small torso.
Back in England, I spoke to Miyako over the phone in Tokyo and through a translator. I needed to know why she made these movingly poetic images. In the background, I could hear her side of the dialogue in Japanese - a dark, sharp voice punctuated by occasional laughter. Miyako explained that she chose to photograph whatever was nearest to her mother's skin: "Skin is the physical boundary between the inner world and the world itself, the first object to communicate with the outside world. I only photographed her alive skin," she said."When she died, I was in such grief because she died suddenly, that I didn't think of photographing her then." The naked breast, she revealed, was taken before her mother died so, unlike my mother, hers knew she was being photographed in this intimate way - and knew the images would be on public display. "She quite understood what I was doing because I explained it to her. Before then, she was very reluctant to expose her skin, but when I asked to photograph it 'for a work of art', she said yes. Not because it would be a work of art but because it would be the work of her daughter." When her mother died, Miyako's instant need was to get rid of all her things, but instead she began photographing them. "I was overwhelmed by the thought that a part of my mother - her undergarments - were equal to her skin. Her belongings were her. By photographing them, I wanted to objectify them, to get rid of the grief and the emotion."
Several friends and I agree that we keep certain objects for the memories and stories they store, but Miyako's relationship with her mother hadn't been close, and her mother's possessions didn't evoke personal memories. But through photographing them she found she could communicate with her through them - and they now reside in a box at home. I noted how Miyako refers to the possessions she photographed as objets, elevating them to art objects, a way of detaching from them. I can't do that with the vest; I can't throw it away nor can I frame the photograph. Perhaps, with time, it will lose its potency - like the smell on the pillow where a lover had slept. My friend Krysia keeps her mother's hairband and says she cries when she wears it because she can still smell her hair on it. "I don't wear it often," she says, "because it could lose her smell." Miyako sees her saved items as indicative of "an accumulation of time". She sees in them "a decay and deterioration which matches the deceased. They spent time with my mother and I see them as representations of her lost past."
In complete contrast are those friends of mine who reject inanimate mementos for objects with life and futures. My sister, for example, transplanted Mum's beloved fuschia into her own garden and was thrilled at last year's seemingly symbolic frenzy of flowers. In Italy, Krysia transplanted her mother's wild geraniums from Kent, and, in Brighton, I cosset my mother's like pets. But inanimate objects can also symbolise the future. My friend Melissa's mother left her silk negligée for her daughter's wedding and now it's waiting in a box for her girls'. "But," she confesses, "when I see Sarah [her daughter] cooking us all breakfastwearing the dressing-gown my mother died in, I feel overwhelmed."
After Mum died, my sister, brother and I chose things of hers we wanted to keep. I'd always loved her mossy-green Kangol beret with a small bow on the brim, and wore it to her funeral. I also keep her small brown suitcase, which I call "The Room of her Own", because it contains clues to a life she rarely shared with us. Inside the lid she had written, in 1939, her maiden name and the address of her then fiancé Sonny's family. In that year she joined the army, found freedom, and ended the engagement. Inside are her birth certificate, her army tie, Sonny's present of an autograph book containing loving epithets. The case reinvents my mother as a stranger - a single, free, adventurous woman moving around England during the war, having a fiancé I know nothing of, and not yet aware of her future husband. Tantalisingly mysterious, it's truly her room. In my quest for stories from friends and family, I mostly heard about the potent objects which work like African fetishes for those of us left motherless. Most surprising were the two abstract mementos which carry as much - conceivably more - potency, maybe because they exist only in internal, private memories.
My school friend Sheila, whose mother was a kind presence during my school days, clings to a memory which she says is "more consoling than anything I've saved of hers in a box. Before she lost consciousness, she took my hand in both of hers and turned it round, and looked at it, and then stroked the palm. At that point, she couldn't really speak any more. When we left, I blew kisses and she raised her hand to me and blew them to me. She never opened her eyes to me again. Like your mother," she added, "she wasn't able to be emotionally demonstrative; she'd never done that to me before. I think it was a very generous way of saying goodbye."
My sister-in-law, Jeanette, who doesn't easily talk at an emotional level, sent me an email which brought me to helpless tears. "I couldn't really find any material things that really mean much about my life with my mother," she wrote, "but what I do have is her last breath. At that moment, I felt how her life and mine were one, and why she was the person she was, how she felt, how she hurt and how she so loved life. I realised in that last moment what immortality really was and my mother gave me that."
I set out to write this story partly because I was moved and inspired by Annie Leibovitz's photographs of her dead lover, and partly after the surprise discovery of Miyako Ishiuchi's work. Both these discoveries have helped me reconsider my own exploitation of photography and objects intimate with my mother as part of the process of grieving, and also made me curious about how women close to me have handled the loss of their mothers.
I wore my mum's hat today.
