Ana
I am watching my aunt, Ana, and she is fading.
A long and difficult decline.
She was active and now she is not.
She was a furious, outspoken, uncompromising voice for human rights, and now, she finds it hard to focus. The tumult of this world goes on above and beyond her.
Now, she is bed bound. Completely reliant, in every way, on others.
The decline, it started slowly. There were falls, lots of them, and late night trips to the emergency room. There was the refusal to use the zimmer frame, and then the realization that she had to, bracing herself against its handle bars and shuffling her feet to Colombian music on a Friday night. She still got the rhythm. There was the laughter, the longing to participate. The body frail, and falling apart. The pain.
Even now, frail as she is, with little strength left in her body, she has plans for what to do when she gets “out of here.” Greece. Colombia. Ireland. They are all on her list. Hydra, the Greek island she once indignantly described as, “my island,” she wants to go there.
In 2022, I took some photos of her when she was still able to pull herself up on the zimmer frame, haul herself up by a handlebar to investigate the contents of the fridge. Taken over two days in April, these photos give a sense of what life had become for her, a woman who once had the love of the Irish actor, Peter O’Toole, who ran away to Spain, as lore would have it, with one of the de Rothschilds, who traversed the Colombian Amazon to meet the FARC, and wrote the defining book on what truly happened at the Colombian Supreme Court in November 1985, now confined to the ground floor of a row house in London, reliant on others to get her up, to get her out.
The necessary dying of life wrapping itself around her like strong vines, dragging her back down into the earth. Slowly.
