‘A History of Vanishing’
Introduction
This project is an attempt to solve a family mystery—one that exists in fragments, in fading memories, in the spaces between truth and memory loss. As a photographer, I see images as evidence, forensic clues that might reveal something hidden. But what happens when the story itself is incomplete? When memory slips away? When the past refuses to be fully known?
When my mother began to lose her short-term memory to dementia, so too did I lose my last witness. Her past unraveled in fragments—sometimes vivid, sometimes hidden, sometimes lost altogether. I was left with unanswered questions about my father’s death in 2019.
How did he die? What were the cuts on his forehead? Were the marks on his neck bruises? I found the absence of any furniture that could explain the injuries. I had always positioned my mother as a victim of his control and violence. But had I seen the full story? Had I understood anything at all? The police examined his body and determined that an inquiry into his death was “not in the public interest.” But the questions remained.
Since then, I have turned to photography—not just to document, but to investigate, as if piecing together a murder mystery from the evidence left behind. I have photographed my mother’s flat, the objects she holds close, the spaces she inhabits. I turn to the photo albums, the birth certificates, the woods, and the old holiday house. Each image is a clue, an attempt to reconstruct what memory can no longer hold.
This series is an act of searching. The truth is fractured, slipping between memory, evidence, and absence. I call it A History of Vanishing because it is not just about the loss of memory, but about the hidden truths in my family—the stories that disappeared, the ones never told, the ones that may never be fully recovered. Somewhere within the gaps, I am still looking to understand.
The following blog chapters are not in order, they are clues and you might use them to solve the mystery.
Each year, when I was a child, we returned to the summer house in the pine forest. In 2021, I returned to look again at this space.
Trees have memories—a molecular memory shaped by their past experiences, with a calcium signaling network to store and recall information. They learn when to seed, when to prepare for drought, when to defend against pests. Do the trees remember my family dynamics? Might they whisper stories of children who were not safe? When I remind my mother of the events of my childhood she does not deny, but asks, ‘Where was I?’ As if dementia was merely an extension of a long established habit of willful amnesia.
The forest held echoes of the past, but I was haunted by something else—Hansel and Gretel, the children abandoned in the woods, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the hope of finding their way home. In the fairytale, they encounter an old woman with a house made of sweets, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The need to return to our parents, even when they are cruel, is a survival instinct. We attach, because without it, we might die.
At the real house, we played tennis, built jump courses in the woods, and trained imaginary ponies for hours before riding the real ones. Horses were woven into our lives. My mother would tell us a story—how, as a small child, she once went missing. Her grandfather found her in a nearby field, on a pony, facing the wrong way. He had been a jockey and took it as a sign that it was in her blood.
Horses shaped our world, and my last one died a few years ago. What chasm did they fill? Power, speed, soul mate? I once had six legs and a huge heart—Arabian bloodlines, red hair. I have worked with equine coaches and therapists and seen the transformations they bring, the way they humble business leaders and help soldiers with PTSD find peace. Did my mother need this too? Or did she simply need a friend?
She disliked people and preferred solitude. Now, she lives alone by choice, but dementia has made that choice more complex as she cannot walk out. Her flat has become a kind of prison. She forgets to turn on the lights, to open the windows. The Juliet balcony looks like a set of bars to me.
To find healing, we must purge the demons. Trauma is stored in the body—it keeps the score. The answers are never simple. It is a journey of unearthing, of bravery. For when we empty trauma out, we create a void—one that must be filled with new emotions.
Did my mother commit murder? It is impossible to prove and searching for answers does not change the present.
In a good mystery, we establish three things: motive, means, and opportunity. Motive is the trickiest. Many people feel the urge to commit violence in moments of anger—but most stop at the fantasy.
In the hospital, I sat with my father. He was dead. A heart attack, they said. He collapsed at home. But I don’t know exactly where he died—my mother says she doesn’t remember. His body told a different story. Two deep cuts on his forehead. Bruising on his neck. The police asked us to wait in a room while they examined him.
Back at my parents’ house, I began cleaning up the blood—so much blood on the floor. I searched for whatever he had fallen against, the thing that had cut his head, so I could wipe that clean too. The coffee table? The mantelpiece?
It took me six weeks to find the rusty red stains—on something unexpected.
What happens to a person’s mind if they read crime stories every day for forty years? Would it ease the pain?
I use books to escape too, but never the dark ones. I devour prize-winners—and I have a delicious secret: I read Chick Lit. Maybe my mother was escaping too, crime fiction a pathway out of her marriage?
Coercive control isn’t just about violence—it’s about domination. My father controlled through silence, through moods that dictated the atmosphere in the house. We learned to watch for signs, to anticipate his needs before he spoke. We knew when to disappear.
School, the stables, and the woods were my sanctuary. At home, we sought permission just to exist in his space. He isolated us—not in obvious ways, but through disapproval, making the outside world seem dangerous or untrustworthy. Friends weren’t welcome. If he earned the money and owned the house, he believed that gave him the right to make every decision. His opinions were facts. Any challenge—however small—was met with sulking, rage, or withdrawal.
He didn’t need to hit often. Coercive control doesn’t happen all at once. It creeps in, layer by layer.
I wonder if one day my mother simply couldn’t take any more. A voice whispers, ‘But she isn’t a good person either, is she?’
My mother has dementia. Her mother did too, and my father’s grandmother. If the women in my family lack power, might they need to avoid remembering that? These women had a history of vanishing.
I have a hypothesis. Could there be a kind of memory loss that comes from forcing the brain to bury the past? I wonder if we can train our neural pathways to forget the unsavoury realities of life—until, one day, those pathways die, and the past becomes a hazy wasteland of lost jigsaw pieces.
I’ve read studies about how our attention spans are changing, reshaped by screen addiction. The pattern of three seconds attention before we swipe, strengthens some neural pathways and weakens others. The brain is plastic; it can rewire itself. Perhaps we could rebuild the muscles we abandoned and transform. The possibilities are appealing.
But what if, instead of reshaping the brain, you numbed it? What if you used alcohol to drown the past? If you weren’t proud of your choices, if you felt change was impossible—what might the brain do then? Can whisky and denial poison the frontal lobes?
I have no scientific proof, but society needs artists to challenge the way we see issues, to offer inspiration, and to question our versions of reality. Last year, I worked on a dementia study for King’s College and University College London. My role was to humanise statistics through portraits. A portrait is a witness to a life. It offers a glimpse of the soul and tells part of your story. I must create my mother’s portrait of dementia, but I’m scared of what I’ll see. I fear her soul is dark—and I fear it is merely ordinary.
Is the mystery of my mother explained by understanding her childhood?
My mother was not wanted by her own mother. We don’t know for certain who her father was. Reading this, I almost pity her. She had a miserable childhood.
Her mother, Marion, fell for one man, married another, then divorced him and returned to her first love—Alec. She adored him. He was evil.
A man once told me that, as a child, he had been unwell. Marion stopped by to check on him while his mother was at work. But the family’s Alsatian wouldn’t let her in. The dog stood guard, refusing to let her cross the threshold. It was protecting the child—from Marion.
The relationship between Marion and Alec was complex. Did she fear him, or was she a willing partner? He cross-dressed. He abused children. She seemed to be his accomplice.
My sister and I have a nickname for them—”Fred and Rosemary.” Saddleworth, nearby is where the Moors murders happened. The bones of children are still hidden there. My family buried their crimes in a suburban garden, behind neatly trimmed hedges and ladylike dresses.
It’s little wonder my mother didn’t know how to parent, and she was not willing to learn. She didn’t touch, play, or even listen. She detached. If I spoke about the abuse happening under her nose, she punished me.
I asked her recently if she would change anything.
“No,” she said. “I had a good life—money, cars, fur coats, holidays.”
I look at my daughter and wonder if she will forgive me for my trial-and-error approach. I love her fiercely, but I had to figure out so much. I envied my friends who could copy their own mothers. That was never an option for me.
Like that Alsatian dog, I have stood guard her whole life.
Does any of this background evidence actually help solve the crime of my father’s death? I feel no closer to understanding my parents. Their behavior remains out of focus, a series of disjointed clues. My mother knows the answers but refuses to tell the truth. Dementia eats her brain.
If only she would confess before she forgets who I am.
If I could understand my father, would I find the origins of his coercive control?
My father was an only child. His mother was a gentle, loving woman from Hayfield in Derbyshire, and she knew all the country names for flowers. Even now, I might be walking through a field when a plant’s name comes to me—arriving instantly, as if by magic. I know it is her voice.
She was my safe haven in childhood. With her, I spent long days in the horse fields. She seemed to have a calming effect on my father.
I was thirteen when she died. After that, my father changed. He began to transform into his own father—the man he had struggled with, now recast as a hero. A man who had always been angry and bombastic was suddenly defined by ‘tough love.’ And my grandmother—her presence, her influence—began to disappear.
“The war changed him,” my father, born in 1941, would say.
But my father never knew him before the war. Did he need to rewrite the narrative, to find a reason for his father’s personality? I think my father knew childhood trauma and carried a fragile sense of his own identity. He abandoned the days of walking and birdwatching and instead became a man who loved cars and parties—parties where teenage girls were the entertainment.
His grandfather had belonged to a men-only club. His great-grandfather was a member of a Masonic lodge in Karachi. In the family box of birth certificates, wills, and documents, I saw a blueprint for a type of masculinity—one that valued power, secrecy, and control.
But my mother’s story was very different.
My parents had a troubled marriage. I told the police about the coercive and financial control. They asked about physical violence. My mum claimed she had once been in hospital after a fight and told the nurse she had tripped. The nurse didn’t believe her.
We moved to a detached house. It was easier for the rages to continue.
So, do I think my mum was a victim? I do. But she also waged a war. My parents’ relationship seemed to thrive on fighting, then punishing their daughters. A person can be both a victim and a perpetrator.
After my father died, I went back to my mum’s home to help her that night. There was so much blood after his heart attack.
“The blood was all over the floor.”
“But I scrubbed and bleached it.”
My daughter added, “I can still see it.”
In our extended family, we had myths—carefully managed versions of the truth. What would happen if I broke this state of denial and found evidence of what really happened the night my father died? What if I photographed objects to make the clues real?
Photography is my way of interpreting the world. The objects in the flat began to tell a story—one that had been there all these years, though I had been trained not to see it. I didn’t notice many of the bloodstains until my daughter pointed them out. Someone had washed the walls, but they left traces.
To solve the mystery of my parents personalities I need to look at where they came from. They were born during World War II. Will I find the clues of generational trauma?
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