Calling the Birds Home

by Gina Martin:

The Bob & Diane Fund is excited to announce photographer Cheryle St. Onge as the 2021 grantee for her photography project, Calling the Birds Home.

This yearly photography grant is to support visual storytelling about Alzheimer's and dementia.

Calling the Birds Home is a photographic exchange of the energy of life—the give and take of the familial between mother and daughter who have lived side by side on the same New Hampshire farm for decades.

“Our love was mutual and constant. In 2015 my mother developed vascular dementia, and with that began the loss of her emotions and her memory and the relationship of mother and daughter as we have known it for nearly 60 years. In my mother’s earlier life, she was a painter and then in the final decades she began to carve birds.

A carving would begin with her vast knowledge of birds, her research and then whittling away at chunks of wood. My mother would eventually offer up an exquisite painted chickadee or barred owl, life-size and life-like. I began to photograph her with any camera in reach—an iPhone or an 8x10 view camera—as a distraction from watching her fade away, as a counterbalance to conversation with her about death, as a means to capture the ephemeral nature of the moment and of life. I needed happiness and light, and to share the images with others I love.

Since her death I have come to better understand just how much of a collaboration this work was. Just how much she suggested, aided and just every damn day was enthusiastically willing to spend time with me and to make pictures together. I continue to be devastated by her absence but the profound loss is because of our love of one another. 

I honor the mindset of both of my parents by, on a daily basis reminding myself that like me, they too would want only for their child to move on in life and thrive. I am not thriving but I am growing bit by bit spiritually and emotionally.”