The day Alzheimer’s defeated my dad: News Corp photographer Gary Ramage’s personal story
Veteran News Corp photographer Gary Ramage has documented war zones worldwide. But photographing the week his father went into an aged care home was his toughest assignment.
Illness
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He is only capable of small, slow steps now. His walk a shuffle.
Badly hunched over, he is barely recognisable as the man I knew. He looks at me and I realise he has no idea who I am.
From the shallow graves of Kosovo to bloody battlefields in Helmand province, this has been by far the hardest photographic assignment of all — documenting the day my father Joe moved into a full-time care facility for people with stage-four dementia.
Whether to photograph the event at all was a struggle, but my father raised me always to tell the truth.
How could I continue to crash into people’s lives with my camera when they are at their most vulnerable and yet not have the courage to do it with my own family? This would have been a blatant double standard.
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We’ve always been a close-knit family. My mum Cindy and dad migrated from Scotland in 1975, Ten Pound Poms. They sacrificed everything, leaving behind their own ageing parents hoping to give their three children, my sisters Geraldine, Nicola and me, a better life Down Under.
Dad has been fighting early-onset Alzheimer’s since he was diagnosed at the age of 65. Now he is 73.
It has to be one of the cruellest diseases. Nothing can prepare you for it, no matter how strong you are.
So holding his shaking hand, as we walk slowly around the facility in an attempt to settle him into his new environment, was truly soul destroying.
His struggle to communicate was particularly difficult. I could see him concentrating so hard, only to have gibberish pass his lips.
But he is still my dad and I love him dearly.
Having to dress him, feed him and help him go to the toilet was a huge reality check. I remember joking when we were kids, saying we would never wipe our parents’ bums.
Well, guess what? You don’t even think about it, you just do it.
All you feel is the love for that person in their time of great need. All the misgivings you had go out the window when the one person you have looked up to your whole life is in pain and needs you.
During other difficult assignments, the camera has always provided a small barrier between me and the horror I was capturing.
Not this time. During that five days I spent with my dad in his new home, the camera did not provide the protection I had hoped it would.
There was no stopping or hiding my tears as I photographed the raw love my mum and sisters were displaying as they tended to my once strong and proud father, now a frail shadow of his former self.
It will stay with me forever.
In the end you can only try to do what is right for your ailing loved one and hope to God the end comes quickly.
Originally published as The day Alzheimer’s defeated my dad: News Corp photographer Gary Ramage’s personal story
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