Calling the Birds Home
My mother and I have lived side by side on the same farm for decades. Our love was mutual and constant. In 2015 my mother developed vascular dementia, and with that began the loss of her emotions and her memory and the relationship of mother and daughter as we have known it for nearly 60 years.
My name is Cheryl St. Onge. I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts the only child of a Physics professor and a painter. I guess I take after the painter (my mother) and chose a creative path. I’m a photographer. Pictures are my words.
Feb 7, 2020: Cheryle and her mother, Carole St. Onge. who died Oct 3, 2020.
Feb 8, 2020: “My mother and I are shedding a lot. For me its tears, the idea of holding on to her in any iteration. For her its vocabulary, the proper use of silverware, some of her agility. One of the things that remain is her sense of humor. And thank goodness because as we have been on this long path, it has been love and laughter that has so brightened what has been a devastating and dark walk beside her.”
In my mother’s earlier life, she was a painter and then in the final decades she began to carve birds. A carving would begin with her vast knowledge of birds, her research and then whittling away at chunks of wood. My mother would eventually offer up an exquisite painted chickadee or barred owl, life-size and life-like.
At first I stopped making pictures with her, then I stopped making pictures at all. Then, I began to photograph her with any camera in reach—an iPhone or an 8x10 view camera—made in the moment, as a distraction from watching her fade away, as a counterbalance to conversations of why she wanted to die, of how she imagined she could die. And because I needed some happiness, some light in the afternoon, these portraits of my mother began. I would make a picture of her, then share that picture of her with others I love. Sharing the act of being in the moment, sharing the ephemeral nature of my looking and her seeing.
I came to believe that she must’ve recalled our history and the process of picture making. Because she brightened up and was always up for what my children would refer to as the long effort with the long camera. That best describes sitting before an 8” x 10” view camera, on top of a tripod with its bellows extended out. My mother did her best and I did mine. And then in turn, I gave the picture away to anyone who would look. It is an excruciating form of emotional currency.
Since her death I have come to so better understand just how much of a collaboration this work was. Just how much she suggested, aided and just every damn day was enthusiastically willing to spend time with me and to make pictures together. I continue to be devastated by her absence but the profound loss is because of our love of one another.
I honor the mindset of both of my parents by, on a daily basis, reminding myself that like me, they too would want only for their child to move on in life and thrive. I am not thriving but I am growing bit by bit spiritually and emotionally.
Now, when I leave our home, when I leave my mother behind, people find me. They want to tell me their stories and they want to hear mine. It's a beautiful back and forth, much like a true portrait. Because of the dementia, we have no conversations. But we do still have this profound exchange - the making of a portrait.
Calling the Birds Home, is a photographic exchange of the energy of life—the give and take of the familial between mother and daughter who have lived side by side on the same New Hampshire farm for decades. Calling the Birds Home, 2018-2020, Diasec, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. © Cheryle St. Onge.
This is story was generously shared by Cheryle St. Onge, daughter of Carole St. Onge who died of vascular dementia as inspiration to rediscover how to connect with dying loved one with a cognitive disease, or whatever the communication barrier.
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