The text you see eked out in the first five images (and in the titles), are my father’s words during the last days of his life. Those days were predictably awful: hospitals, tubes and bedpans, mindfucking drugs—the indignities of a long life’s end, sadly commonplace. Intubated, he couldn’t speak. So, when he could, he wrote things down. Some stuff was illegible, some banal (I have a green notebook falling apart but still useful. I would like it here. Put a rubber band around it.), a few things cryptic. My father was proud of his beautiful handwriting, but by then those veiny hands shook so much all he could write were scrawls. I kept those pages and photographed them, so the words in the images (save for the last, which has none) are rendered directly from his own hand. His last words.

A difficult person to know, my father. (Yes, I know, so is everyone. But not equally so.) For one thing he didn’t trust anyone, not ever. I know he didn’t trust me because he told me so the one time I cornered him on it. That was just one more sad thing because, especially at the end, with my mother alive but demented, he had no one else.

Where did that mistrust come from? Maybe from a life through adulthood, full of hardship: poverty, war, sickness. Loss. An older sister who wrote her little brother Joe letters that my apparently unsentimental father kept always; she would die at 34 from tuberculosis. Then TB himself, a year in a sanitorium at age seventeen. No one visited me, not once, I overheard him telling someone, sixty years after.

Of course, the elder sibling of mistrust is fear. And my father feared. That austere early life didn’t help. His father supporting a family of five on the wages of a sailor and then as a driver for the rich. The Great Depression. Then the War, my father at home in England (no diseased lungs in the army, If I'd gone I’d have been killed right away, I know it, he told me once), alone with his mother who was literally shellshocked from the bombings. Weeping on the stairwell, I remember her, he said. And then later, a life begun with nothing alongside his bride Frances. I think he loved her—he photographed her constantly (okay, I see, I’m associating that with love)—but she was troubled to put it mildly, fighting and consorting with her own torments, more violent than his. When she’d explode and splinter, which was often, he’d take shelter, locking the door behind him and leaving anyone else (I’m talking mostly about myself here) to find cover on their own.

Sometimes, when I look at his eyes in these portraits I imagine them peeping through a cellar keyhole, checking to see if today’s hurricane has passed.

He wanted to be an artist, my father. He drew all the time, everywhere, and not badly for someone unschooled. The ritual I remember from childhood: flip over the paper placemat in Murray’s Restaurant in Montreal, and draw people with his ballpoint pen. But all that fear—especially poverty’s abyss, never far away—made a career as an artist more than just daunting. Instead he joined my mother and became a book seller. Life as a small merchant was hard but not ridiculous, not impossible like an artist's.

He also lacked those two essential qualities, underrated or even unnoticed by people who aren’t artists: a centered ruthlessness alongside relentless obsession. You need those if you want to make such a self-seeking and nebulous pursuit, with long odds against success (however defined), into your life’s mission.

When he saw me muddling my way into an art career—and it was he who introduced me to photography, let me give the man his due—my father was, on the surface anyway, pointedly indifferent at best. Actually, no; he hated it. In what felt like a taunt (and it was), all he’d ever say about my work was, How many pictures have you sold? (An effective barb—I sold little.) Other people said he was jealous—the schooled son who didn’t know poverty or war or sickness chasing the father’s dream. In any case, I responded to what I felt as meanness and rejection with the predictable: sullen expressions of meanness and rejection of my own.

Families.

Here’s a funny story. Some people chide me, saying it’s not funny at all. But, honestly, I think it is. My mother told the story, swearing it to be truth not mischief. The conversation:

MY MOTHER: On the day you were born do you know what your father did when the nurse told him you were a boy?

ME (wondering where this is going): I don’t know.

MY MOTHER: He fainted. Just like that, right then and there.

ME (incredulously, and realizing immediately that what I was about to say was ludicrous): You mean he fainted because he was overcome with emotion?

MY MOTHER (I imagine her suppressing neither laugh nor eye roll, and thinking her only child rather dimmer than she realized): No, because he wanted a girl.

ME: Wait, you mean he fainted from disappointment?

(At this point I’m thinking: Who in fuck faints from disappointment?)

MY MOTHER: That’s right.

Then we both laughed and, for a few minutes, liked each other in the way people do when they engage in minor familial conspiracy.

Apparently, months before my birth, my father, perhaps magically thinking it would tip the whole gender business his way, had chosen a name for what would be his only child. The baby girl would be Rita.

Rita Rodick, Rita Rodick. Try rolling that over your tongue a few times. Good grief.

Fast forward decades to September 2015 when I started this project, old photos of Joe Rodick scattered across my floor. As usual, I don’t know what to do with them, I dont’ know if there’s anything here at all. I don’t know what I want to say, or if I have anything to say. So I do as always: I wander in and out of the pictures, in and out of myself. Space and time, rinse and repeat. I get lost in the images and in all the ways they seem to become something else. Which is magical actually but it usually leads to me getting lost. I dislike feeling lost—which, unfortunately, I feel most of the time—and I get exasperated, fuck this and fuck that I say repeatedly, which I also do this often. I read and reread those seven chicken scratched pages of my father’s last words till my eyes bleed. Reading those pages over and over is weird—sometimes I find a whole sentence that I'd swear I never saw before.

I spend a good amount of time feeling sorry for myself, for a whole bunch of reasons. And, at times, when my father’s picture becomes more than just an image, I feel sorry for him too. More sorry than I ever did when he was alive.

I go up and down alleyways, most of them blind. Blind, but not mute—they all have something to say, even if it’s just a whispered nudge in one direction or other. I work and, even more important, I wait. (I hate waiting.) I wait for the pictures to tell me what to do next.