The Last Portrait: Local photo exhibition captures different takes on dying

The woman in the photograph sits in dappled sunlight in her Sherrill yard in a wheelchair, holding still as her son moves in to plant a kiss on her cheek while a gray cat photobombs the shot.

Patricia Card died about six months after the photo was taken, at age 82. But the photo doesn’t remind her son of saying his final goodbye to the mom who always stood by him. It reminds him, he said, of their “last hurrah,” a time when they did “whatever the hell we wanted.”

When his mother was diagnosed with a terminal case of amyloidosis in 2014, it hit him and his mother hard, especially after she suffered a series of strokes and ended up in hospice care.

But, as she went off a number of her medications to focus on palliative care, his mom actually started to do better, well enough, in fact, to be discharged from hospice care for six months before returning shortly before her death in March 2016.

“During that time frame, that’s when we had the time of our lives because that’s when we just started going out and doing things,” recalled Card, who had returned home from Washington state to take care of his mother. (His sister lives in Virginia and his brother in Old Forge.)

They went to a hops festival, took in a Broadway show at the Stanley Theatre and sipped Manhattans together (after his mother taught Card how to make them), he recalled. Charlie, the neighbor’s gray cat, used to come by to visit his mother, curling up in her lap.

The Last Portrait

The photo of one of those happy days will form part of The Last Portrait, a photography exhibit at The Other Side, 2011 Genesee St., in Utica from the evening of Friday, Feb. 9 through March 2. The exhibit kicks off with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. on Friday courtesy of Hospice & Palliative Care, Inc. In New Hartford and The Other Side.

The 26 black-and-white photos, taken by local photographer Mark DiOrio, all capture moments in the life of someone who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

“I wanted to photograph them because they’ve been given news that nobody wants to hear,” DiOrio explained. “They’ve been given the news that it’s going to be their time soon. And when you’re given that kind of news, you have choices to make on how you handle it. I felt that these people, what they had to say and the emotions that they communicated in that moment were invaluable.”

DiOrio worked with the New Hartford hospice, whose staff helped him find subjects willing to participate in the project between 2015 and 2021 (although DiOrio is open to continuing the series). His subjects range in age from an infant to a centenarian.

Their diagnoses varied — cancer, respiratory illnesses, ALS, Alzheimer’s disease — as did their health otherwise, their attitudes and their personalities, DiOrio said. But at least 25 of them (DiOrio doesn’t know the fate of the 26th) have died since their portraits were taken. In fact, the project was unusual because he knew going in that most of his subjects would never see his photos, DiOrio said.

Most of the photos were taken in or outside the patient’s homes, some with family and some alone. The photo captions give their names, the location and the years of their births and deaths. Some contain many more details from interviews DiOrio captured on video, their depth depending on the subject’s mood and health at the time.

In one photo, a man sits alone in a wheelchair in front of a wall covered with family photos. He looks straight into the camera, without even a hint of a smile, with an oxygen tube running to his nose, a walking stick in his hand and a U.S. Marine Corps blanket covering his lap.

In another, the subject and his wife turn their heads, close their eyes and kiss. And a bearded man in a Chicago Bulls watch cap sits, an unreadable expression in his eyes, while four people, their heads cut off by the photo, place their hands on his shoulders.

Others show a woman with a black-and-white cat in her arms and a twinkle in her eye; the infant, DiOrio’s first portrait for the series, cradled in her sari-clad mother’s arms; and a woman, decades younger than most of the subjects, sitting in a chair in a short dress and boots, her hair short and her right lower leg missing.

This is DiOrio’s more recent portrait of a woman with cancer who left two young children behind, he said.

The infant, DiOrio’s first portrait in the exhibit, is cradled by her refugee mother. In his last portrait, a woman, decades younger than many of those featured, sits in an armchair in a short dress and boots, her legs looking crossed at first until the viewer notices that the lower leg is missing, amputated, DiOrio said, to try to stop the cancer that eventually killed her. She left behind two young children.

DiOrio had to work around his subject’s health (and the weather) with their stamina playing a role in just what he could shoot. But at times, getting the right shot took a long time. DiOrio wasn’t happy with a photo of a man fishing, not seeing strong emotional content in the shot even though fishing was the man’s favorite hobby.

Then DiOrio found out that the man and his wife were going to renew their wedding vows later in the year. He came back and got another shot.

“For me, the photo of the two of them together,” DiOrio said, “was much more powerful than the one of him just fishing.”

Taking portraits of people facing death did teach DiOrio something about life.

“Seeing what they’re going through in their words, how they’re handling it, (I walked) away from each shoot with a renewed sense of not taking time for granted and always keeping family in the forefront of my mind,” he said, “because we don’t know when our day is going to come until it’s too late.”

Card and his mother didn’t hesitate when asked to participate in the portrait project, he said.

“Me and my mom just said, ‘Sure, we’ll do it,’ because it just seemed like the right thing to do,” he said. “There just seems to be a stigma around hospice and end of life and, you know, oh my God, just to try to take the edge off all of it.”

Talking about his relationship with his mother and the photo shoot brought back vivid thoughts of his mother, particularly her stubbornness, he said. She was also a hugger who was always in Card’s corner, he said.

And she could swear with surprising fluency for someone who looked so sweet, he said.

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“She was a very, very strong woman, super strong, and in very good shape,” he said. “She walked. She always walked. She shoveled her own snow and mowed her own lawn. All that stuff, right into her 80s.”

When the end finally came, it was just the way she would have wanted, at home with all three of her children by her side, Card said.

And although she’s gone, exhibition visitors can get a small sense of what she and the other portrait subjects were like, and about how they coped with life in the shadow of their own mortality.

DiOrio said he hopes that exhibition visitors will relate to the people and experiences in the portraits, and find comfort in seeing others go down a road everyone must eventually travel.

“And I’m also hoping this helps to further the taboo discussion of death,” he said. “It’s a subject that nobody, at least in western culture, really wants to deal with.”

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Hospice patients featured in local photo exhibition at The Other Side