"Till Death Do Us Part"

Becky Wilkes documented the final year of her mother and father’s life. Bob and Mary Behrens were married 67 years. They loved sunshine, fresh coffee, and square dancing. They left behind four kids, nine grandkids, and more than a dozen great-grandkids, including, as Wilkes put it in the obituaries, one or two unnamed imminent arrivals. Wilkes shot the memorial. She kept shooting afterward. She shot her parents’ idle walkers, folded up in the garage, and the golden boxes that hold their cremated remains. She staged a local exhibition of those photographs alongside furniturethat she fashioned from Kleenex and incontinence pads. On the gallery’s windows, she stuck vinyl transcriptions of text from the condolence cards that her family received. She didn’t realize until too late that she had almost no photographs of herself with her parents from their last year together. In retrospect, she writes in her artist’s statement, I recognize there were times when I used the camera to separate me from the moment I was witnessing. Till Death Do Us Part preserves those moments in a compendium of caregiving: Bob and Mary for each other, and their daughter for them.

Read The New Yorker’s A Photographer’s Frank, Tender Portrait of Her Parents’ Final Year here.