Where the Ocean Ends, Mountains Becoming｜海盡之處，群山初現

When I was young, my father made a quiet request: if he were ever beyond saving, I was to take him to the center of the ocean. There, with only sea and sky around him, he would let himself disappear. His words felt like fate, lingering in my mind.

Illness came in waves. Cancer followed. What unsettled me most was not only the diagnosis, but the father and son we had never quite learned how to be. Silence had long been the undertone of our relationship; now it was overlaid with pain and a thin sheen of regret.

I was still young when my father told me something I did not fully understand. He made the request quietly, almost casually: if illness were ever to claim him beyond repair, I was to take him to the center of the ocean. There, surrounded by nothing but water and sky, he would let himself disappear. At the time, I thought he was speaking about freedom—the vastness, the horizon without walls. Only years later did I begin to understand that he was also speaking about fear, and about dignity, in his own restrained way.

When the illness finally arrived, that sentence returned to me with a weight I could no longer ignore.

I did not know how to face him. So I raised a camera.

Through the viewfinder, I found a distance I could endure. I focused on the way light rested on his skin, on the curve of a tube against the sheets, on the slow rhythm of the curtain breathing by the window. The mechanics steadied me. As long as I was measuring light and framing edges, I did not have to name what was happening between us.

Yet I began to sense that recording is never innocent. He lay there, but I chose where to stand. He closed his eyes, and I decided when to press the shutter. Those decisions did not begin in the room; they were shaped by years of misunderstanding, restraint, and unspoken attachment. What appears objective is already marked by the one who looks.

Each click carried a subtle retreat. A moment earlier, I was a son inside the experience; the next, I was arranging a surface. The more faithfully I tried to preserve him, the more I had to step back from his pain. That step both protected me and revealed the distance we had always kept.

Later, alone with the images, I searched for a sequence, a structure—something that might resemble the conversation we never managed to have. Memory shifted between the frames, sometimes clarifying, sometimes revising. The photographs became both evidence and reconstruction, holding his presence while exposing the limits of my understanding.

I still do not know whether the ocean he imagined was an escape, a surrender, or a final claim to dignity. I only know that, in the space between looking and loving, I am still trying to find a way to stand beside him without turning away.

Now his illness is gradually easing, even healing, and our relationship has been completely transformed because of this project.