A visual story and work in progress.

Introduction

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. I searched for whatever he had fallen against, the object 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 an unexpected ornament.

“The blood was all over.”

“But I scrubbed and bleached it.”

My daughter added, “I can still see it.”

I am unravelling a mystery—how did my father die? This is a personal investigation, piecing together fragments of the past, searching for answers in photographs, letters and objects. My mother, who now has dementia, holds some of the truth, but her recollections have a history of vanishing.

I return to what remains, scattered across the table like the remnants of a case file, each one a clue leading to a different version of events. There is a wound in this story—one that refuses to heal. The true story of my father’s death is something I may never understand. And yet, I keep looking, searching for the thread that will tie it all together. The blood stains on the wall are still there, waiting to be deciphered. Someone had washed them away, but they left traces.

Crime Scene or Accident?

When my mother began to lose her short-term memory to dementia, I lost my last witness. Her past unravelled in fragments. I had always positioned my mother as a victim of my father’s control and violence. But had I seen the full picture? Could the birth certificates, the woods, and the old holiday house provide clues? Each image is a piece of the puzzle, an attempt to reconstruct the past. The truth is fractured. A History of Vanishing is not just about memory loss, but about the concealed truths within my family.

Blood Traces

My parents had a troubled marriage. I told the police about the coercion and financial manipulation. They asked about physical violence. My mother 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 his rages to continue. In our family, we had myths—carefully managed narratives. What would happen if I broke this state of denial and documented what I think happened the night my father died?  I do not think it was a straightforward heart attack. To make sense of this, I need to look at my parents’ history. They were born during World War II. Will I find the roots of generational trauma there?

The War

If I could understand my father, would I uncover the origins of his need for coercive control? He was an only child. His mother, a gentle woman from a village in Derbyshire, 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 shape himself in the image of his own father—the man he had struggled with, now recast as a hero. A man who had always been angry and bombastic, who collected German ration books and guns from fallen soldiers needed transforming. “The war changed him,” my father, born in 1941, would say. But my father never knew him before the war.

He needed to rewrite his father’s legacy. He abandoned birdwatching and became a man obsessed with cars and parties—parties where teenage girls were the entertainment. He bought a new car every nine months and washed it twice a day, as though the pristine surfaces were the only thing he could truly control. 

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 built on secrecy and dominance. They passed down a cigar box from man to man with a captive bear that danced to a tune when the key was turned. I wonder if the need to wield power is an inheritance passed through generations. My mother’s story was different.

Background Check

My mother was not wanted by her own mother. We don’t know for certain who her father was. 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.

The relationship between Marion and Alec was complex. Did she fear him, or was she complicit? He wore dresses in private. He abused children. She seemed to be his accomplice. My sister and I have a nickname for them—“Fred and Rosemary.”

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. I asked her recently if she would change anything. “No,” she said. “I had a good life—money, cars, fur coats, holidays.”

So, do I think my mum was a victim? I do. But she also waged a war. My parents’ relationship seemed to thrive on conflict, then punishing their daughters. A person can be both a victim and a perpetrator. She once told me she would have left but had no money, no career. How would she have supported herself? She had no independent bank account. I asked a friend of theirs recently if my mother was a victim. “No,” he said. “She was strong, always held her own.”

If only she would confess before she forgets who I am.

The Cause of Dementia

My mother has dementia. Her mother did too, and my father’s grandmother. If the women in my family have been unhappy, might they have needed to forget reality? 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? Does forcing the brain to bury the past lead to a kind of memory loss? I wonder if we can train our neural pathways to erase difficult truths—until, one day, those pathways die, leaving only a wasteland of lost jigsaw pieces.

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 a story. I must create my mother’s portrait of dementia, but I’m afraid of what it will reveal.

Trial Adjourned

A History of Vanishing is the story I am trying to purge. Trauma lingers in the body—it keeps the score. But when we empty ourselves of its weight, we create a void. And in that space, something new can take root. This is a journey of unearthing. Of bravery. Of making space for something beyond pain and seeking some peace.

Expert Witness: Soraya Lawrence, Barrister

The criminal justice system provides safeguards for those accused of wrong-doing and those providing evidence of it. Any case that comes to trial follows a procedure: the prosecution presents the evidence and the jury evaluates that evidence and decides whether it makes them sure that the allegation is proven. 

But what happens when the witness, be it complainant or defendant, suffers from dementia? 

Our system depends on the ability for evidence to be presented coherently and for it to be possible for the evidence to be challenged and tested. How reliable is the witness? Does what they say stack up with other evidence? 

Is it fair to subject a defendant to the rigours of a trial when there is no way of testing the reliability of the evidence against them? 

Or, equally, when the complainant now has dementia and is unable to repeat evidence they once provided? 

In neither case does a current state of dementia make the original evidence more or less reliable. But it does render it wholly unquantifiable and, therefore,  impossible to assess.  

When complaints are made about events that happened many decades ago there are always huge obstacles. Original “scenes of crime” may have been bulldozered, other witnesses may no longer be alive, records  no longer exist.

When dementia enters the arena the fog is so absolute it cannot be penetrated.

Expert Witness: Dr. Linda Montague, Consultant Psychiatrist

What is memory? “The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information” says the dictionary. 

It isn’t infallible, though. We have probably all had the experience of thinking we remembered something accurately then finding we were wrong. A photo, someone else’s account, an object found somewhere other than where we left it… memory can fail us.

It fails some people more than others. Dementia, we call it when it’s a progressive and irreversible decline. Other things fail too; word processing, facial recognition, the ability to sequence thoughts and activities.

“How is your father?” said my aunt to my mother when we visited her. There was a moment of stunned silence as we processed this in the face of the fact that their father had died in 1945. Then aunt said “Oh, I think I am getting mixed up”. Insight, we call that in the trade. 

Yet there are moments of clarity too. My father was well advanced in his dementia when I met my husband-to-be. I introduced him to my father every time we met, and every time he forgot who this strange man was. And then one day my father said, out of the blue “That’s a good man you’ve got yourself there!”. My husband wasn’t even with us. But something had gone into my father’s mind and stayed. 

Suppose a relative with dementia told you something terrible. A secret they had carried for years. Could you believe them? Might it not be their secret but someone else’s that they had learnt and muddled into their own life? Might it be a terrible fantasy, released by the disinhibition of their cognitive decline? Or might it be real?

One of my patients turned up at a police station and told them he had killed a child many years earlier. The police got very excited, searched his house, looked through missing child records, interviewed him… his story didn’t hang together, he couldn’t provide any further detail, there was no firm evidence, no missing child matching the story at the relevant time. It went no further. Who knows what happened? What was he remembering? 

Memory. We can’t manage without it, yet it is slippery and unreliable and can let us down when we need it most. In the end, our past can be as unknowable as our future.