A Life Alone

I met Tom Rose by chance and I asked if I could make his portrait. I arrived at his house the following day. He told me that a few months earlier he had lost Mary, his wife of sixty years. He was having a hard time dealing with his loss, and we spent a lot of time talking about it.

“You remember something everyday, its memories. And if you don’t have memories, you don’t have anything cause, cause life is but a memory,” Tom says.

Over the course of the next 8 months I continued to visit him and take pictures. He taught me a great deal about life and gave me the opportunity to share his story.

“There is a harvest time for everything in the world. When an orange gets ripe, you either eat it or it rots. When a tree gets so big it should be cut and used because it is going to decay and rot back into the soil, and a human life is the same way. You have to learn to manage and take care of what you have or you don’t have anything,” Tom said.