Viva El Amor

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Reflections Portraits by Tom Hussey

Tom Hussey portrays old people looking at their younger reflection in the mirror. These photographs are beautiful and melancholic.

i love these

These are so cool.

This makes me think of my maternal grandmother, who just back from the hospital after a stroke and a surgery. She seems fine… Only she thought that it’s summer when she asked my mother how did she manage to go on a sleigh ride without snow.

My dear lady, it’s February. Heart of the winter.

“Oh. So it seems.”

Then I realized I’ve never seen photos of her when she was young. And today she’s only a pale shadow of what she used to be when we were kids and often stayed at her place with our cousins during the summer. You always obeyed her. You didn’t want to disrespect her. And she had the softest lawn in her back yard and rowan trees, until her daughters finally caught up with her deteriorating condition some years back and sold the house which she had paid off alone after her husband had died while raising four daughters on a server’s wages.

Today I got thinking that maybe she’d be better off if… I don’t know. My mother seems to think that she should somehow transcend her condition and go out and move about in spite of not being able to properly move her feet, and that all this could have been somehow avoided if she’d have been more physically active when she started getting old. I don’t know how her condition actually works, but it’s eating away at her nervous system; that’s how she was initially hospitalized, because she broke her arm after she’d fallen down when her knee gave out. It doesn’t sound like something that can be thwarted by activities, exercise and healthy food alone, although they definitely would have helped her.

I love this photo set so much.

Daily, I work among people who, through chance and consequence, have seen their bodies give out on them. These people are too often seen as burdens, as a waste of resources or whatever.

and that’s bullshit.

Who decided that once someone reaches a certain age, they stop being seen as people? Instead, and this is a sad indictment of the health profession, they are seen as elderly gaping mouths and not the culmination of a lifetimes worth of stories, wisdom and experience.

and that’s a fucking tragedy.