Bob and Diane FUND

2023 Women photograph grant

 Love, Oma

By Clara Shuku Mokri

Love, Oma is a personal project about the relationship between maternal grandparents—my grandfather, an Alzheimer’s patient and my grandmother, his full-time spousal caregiver.

A year ago, my grandparents were approved for the highly competitive Section 8 low-income housing program. My grandfather, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when I was in high school and had recently become more reclusive, did not take the news well that they would be moving. Shortly thereafter, his condition worsened and he became more dependent on my grandmother to take care of him. Due to my grandparents’ financial situation and the lack of affordable housing and caregiving options, my grandmother’s health began to decline as well. She suffered anxiety attacks, stress-induced high blood pressure and became increasingly fatigued.

In March, my grandfather was hospitalized. His kidneys were functioning at 7% and his arteries were 90% blocked. With dialysis and a heart transplant off the table, the doctors told us that he had weeks to months left to live, and recommended that he enter hospice. My grandfather was adamant about wanting to receive care at home, but due once again to the lack of low-income options, our family was left scrambling to find somewhere to transfer him before the hospital kicked him out. The plan was to temporarily place him in a Medicaid-qualifying care facility until we could get him approved for at-home hospice care through the same program.

Four days later, my grandfather passed away alone in the facility.

My purpose in making this work was not only to illustrate the extent to which our healthcare system fails to provide adequate elder care, particularly to low-income immigrant families in the United States, but also to create a time capsule. Photography has always been my way of preserving and recalling history, especially as it pertains to my family. Last year, I spent a month and a half in my grandparents’ home country of Indonesia. Despite my grandfather’s Alzheimer’s, the photographs that I sent him during the trip evoked such vivid and deep-seeded memories of his childhood. There was an urgency with which he shared these stories with me. He was never very talkative in his later years, yet the paragraph-long texts that I received multiple times per day for an entire month and a half were full of detail, candor and nostalgia. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but we were on that trip together and those texts were his way of saying goodbye.