Annette Gendler

Dad’s photo albums stood on one of the upper shelves in Mom’s living room wall cabinet. All eleven of them were rather small (7x9x1¼”) and formed a solid block with their uniform dark green leather spines against the cabinet’s light teak. In them, Dad had chronicled his life in the 1950s as an engineering student in Darmstadt, Germany—before he shipped off to the US on a Fulbright Scholarship to get his PhD at Purdue, before he knew Mom, and before any of us kids entered his life.

I took them down and looked through them again last March, when my sister and I were cleaning out Mom’s old apartment, a task that felt odd, as Mom was still alive. However, in her advanced stage of dementia, most of her belongings confused her or meant nothing to her anymore. Being alone in her apartment had become unbearable to her, so the week before we had moved her into a group home for seniors with dementia.
What a delight to leaf through Dad’s beautifully arranged pages! He had assembled them the way his parents had always done their photo albums: black and white photographs, printed on high quality paper, their white frames trimmed with curlicue scissors to create decorative edges, laid out on black album paper, captions calligraphed in white ink. Ticket stubs from plays or exhibitions, particularly tech fairs, as well as postcards from trips added variety. There were pictures from travels with friends, snapshots of laboratory work settings, portraits of himself and his parents—all well composed and not a single one out of focus.

Here and there, I found that Mom had written into the albums with a ballpoint pen. Trying to make sense of them, she had scribbled notes on some pages or had written the year the album encapsulated on the inside cover, ’57, even though it was indicated elsewhere. I loved her handwriting, but not here.

Then, suddenly, I came upon a spread, where, through the glassine interleaf, an empty page with bits of glue, traces of paper stuck to them, gaped at me. What was this? As I paged along, I discovered more instances where photos had been ripped out.

“What happened?” I asked my sister, holding up a violated double page.

“Yeah,” my sister sighed, “I saw that when I looked at the albums a while back. Apparently, Mom tore out pictures. Who knows why or where they are.”
Our dad passed away 37 years ago. If he had removed pictures, he would have carefully pried them off, sliding a penknife between photo and paper, aiming to leave no trace. Instead, we were left with these destroyed pages, this collision of Mom's confusion later in life and Dad's care and competency in visual presentation.