Memories of my grandmother, Tsuyajyo, stay kindly with me all the time; A small purse in which she collected 500 yen coins to give me and my sister when we visited her. Hide-and-seek on a morning after I stayed the night at her house.

My grandfather became sick and started staying in the hospital when I was a student. On one of his last days, I visited him and found him tied to the bed in sterilization room after he had tried to remove a tube attached to his throat. He was still trying to move and staring at us, even though he could no longer make a sound. “He is not the grandpa you know; maybe you shouldn’t see him anymore.” Tsuyako told me.

Tsuyajyo began showing symptoms of dementia around 2009. She could hardly perform basic tasks like eating or taking a bath, so my mother took care of her at home. Tsuyajyo would often get angry irrationally and became someone my mother no longer recognized as her own mother. Those days lasted for about 2 years.

In 2012, Tsuyajyo moved to a care home where she would stay for the next 7 years.I started photographing this series around that time. While my mother passed her responsibilities to the caregivers, she would visit her mother every few days to spend half an hour there, as if it were her duty, saying “I just wish for her to laugh once a day.” Tsuyajyo gradually became calmer, and singing her original lines became her favorite activity. I was often amazed by her laughter. I was surprised when she gripped my hand more strongly, saying “I wanna hold your arm so tight till I crush the veins!”

I took pictures and made notes of her unique lines so that I could remember these small moments.
In 2018, Tsuyajyo moved to the hospital where her husband had spent his last days. She started receiving Intravenous fluids, as she could no longer eat. She also stopped singing. She could hardly move and was there until her organs slowly stopped working on a night in January 2020, at the age of 100. My mother, father, and I were there with her. I started to feel her absence, but we all smiled, seeing her face.

A series of photos of my grandmother’s last 10 years. Her name Tsuyajyo means “the Shining Lady” in Japanese.

Pigment prints at 10×12 inches