I saw my dad on his death bed

The series began in the days following my father’s death, at a time when everything felt strangely unreal. It is a reflection on what happens to our relationship with places, objects and memories when someone is suddenly no longer there.

There is no right age to lose a parent. It changes the way you move through the world, regardless of the relationship you had with them. Since losing my father, my understanding of time and human connection has shifted. I find myself thinking more often about the people I love and about the inevitability that, at some point, they too will have to experience this kind of loss. That thought breaks my heart.

For most of my life, my father lived primarily in his family countryside home with his obsessively religious mother. He also ran his blacksmith workshop there. He would usually come to see us - my mum, my sister, and me - on weekends. His work was physically demanding and hard. I still remember the accident in which he lost his thumb, after a machine he was working with crushed his hand.

People always told me I was the spitting image of my father. We shared the same height and physique. He was never an openly affectionate father, but I spent many hours with him travelling by car to different clients, sitting in the passenger seat while he drove. I think this was his way of expressing love and wanting to spend time with me. Often, we would do so in complete silence, listening only to the music playing on the radio.

The series was made in two parts. The first was photographed on the day of his death and during the week that followed. The second was made a year and a half later, when I returned to his family home and found its interior almost completely untouched. His suit was still there, the one he had intended to wear on the day he was admitted to hospital with a broken hip. He died a week later, following complications from surgery, just four hours after the last time we saw each other.

At the same time, the outside of the house had undergone an entirely different transformation. The garden and the entire property had been overtaken by vegetation, appearing more alive than ever before. Inside, time seemed to have stopped; outside, it had continued without us.