What do you do as a photographer when your mother is seriously ill and photographing is your way of making intense things more bearable? Grab your camera, of course. By recording the difficult but also loving process together, Lin Woldendorp and her mother remain connected.
Suppose you are a photographer and your mother gets cancer for the fourth time. For the fourth time you see her fear and her pain, her sadness and her resilience, her worries for herself, but especially for you – after all, she passed on to you the gene for Lynch syndrome, the cause of her cancer and perhaps one day too. yours. And then ‘maybe’ is putting it mildly: women with the gene have, depending on the gene and the type of mutation, a 15 to 55 percent chance of uterine cancer and 25 to 70 percent of colon cancer. Usually at a young age, before the age of 50.
Then there is a lot going on in your life; Not only is your mother sick, but you have quite a bit to deal with yourself. And how do you deal with things, as a photographer? By taking photographs, logical, because it is your form of expression, your support, your highly personal way to ‘make intense things more bearable’, as Lin Woldendorp (28) puts it. And mother Liesbeth (63) patiently allows herself to be bombarded into an object – anything to stay connected in this long, difficult, loving process.
At Liesbeth’s home in Arnhem they sit together at the table, mother and daughter, cups of coffee are spread out between the photos. On a chair is a plastic bag full of boxes from the hospital pharmacy; The fact that Liesbeth has been able to stop her immunotherapy does not mean that she is off all medications. Working is no longer possible. In 2022 she stopped her practice as a haptotherapist – one of the photos shows an empty massage table on the day of the farewell in the health center where she worked. Liesbeth: ‘We had an Italian lunch at a long table with all our colleagues, that was my gift. Someone asked for two minutes of silence. Then some tears were shed.’
A kind of rush
Lin lives in Amsterdam, where she cycles every day to the photo studio that she shares with a number of other freelancers. She “taught herself how to photograph,” she says; after completing a higher professional education in communications, she has Het Parool called if she could do an internship in the photo editor. She now works not only for that newspaper, but also for de Volkskrant, for magazines and for artists such as Merol and Goldband. “Being confronted with the finiteness of life at such a young age has given me a kind of rush,” she says. ‘I wanted to be a photographer, so I went for it.’
The confrontation started when she was 5, although not yet consciously. Mother Liesbeth was 40 and was diagnosed with uterine cancer; it looked bad, was the verdict. ‘My uterus had to be removed, so did my ovaries, I immediately entered menopause. In the days before the operation it was uncertain whether there would be metastases, perhaps I only had a few weeks to live. I trembled with terror then. Until my therapist said on the phone: you are not dead yet, you live in the now – from that moment on a certain peace came over me that I try to hold onto until today. When I heard after the operation that everything was fine, I felt how broad you can be as a person, I had been given a second chance. Before that I was in a cocoon, I came out as a butterfly.’
Lin: ‘You couldn’t go back into that cocoon after the illness.’
Liesbeth: ‘I survived an earthquake. I changed jobs and became a haptotherapist, I got divorced, I moved, I started a new life with my wife Hermien. I have become much more self-aware. A lot became clear to me during family constellations. My mother was depressed for ten years when I left home, which had to do with her own mother who had died very young of cancer. That was a kind of frozen mourning. No matter how sweet and warm-hearted she was, she always had an icy layer. Which made me worry a lot and not take care of myself.’
Lin: ‘K disease was not discussed in your home in the past. You became very aware of the intergenerational transfer of solidified grief.’
Liesbeth: ‘Many people in the family died from Lynch before the age of 40. That is a family trauma, also because there was no talking. I didn’t want to pass it on, but unfortunately it happened: you took too much care of me when I was ill at too young an age.’
Lin: ‘But we did start talking a lot about life and death. Those conversations are very deep.’
Forever near
The cancer has returned three times, the last time in 2021: bile duct cancer with a poor prognosis. Lin shows a tattoo on her forearm: ‘forever near’. Liesbeth: ‘That bubbled up in me. I always want to be close.’ Lin: ‘My brother has it too. We had it put there because we thought Liesbeth would die soon.’
Liesbeth: ‘They didn’t say that, they said: this represents an average of a year.’
Lin: ‘For me it felt like: it won’t last long.’
Liesbeth has recovered wonderfully thanks to immunotherapy, but the tumor has not gone away. ‘I’m back on the lifeline, but things can suddenly turn upside down, and then I have to let go of everything here. I am no longer afraid of death, because I am going to the light, but that will still be very difficult.’
Lin: ‘At Lowlands I suddenly had to cry a lot with all my friends around me. Not just out of fear of losing my mother; The older I get, the more I realize that I could soon get cancer myself. I have an intestinal examination every two years, so it is monitored, but they cannot prevent it.’
Liesbeth: ‘It’s a shitty disease.’
Lin: ‘But it does ensure that I grab every opportunity I get with both hands.’
Liesbeth: ‘With four hands, you go that fast. But I also think that you have found peace within yourself, which is nice to see. I am confident that you will soon be able to do it without me. A few years ago I was still the anchor point, now you have the anchor within yourself.’
Children
Just as Lin wanted to know if she was a carrier of the Lynch gene at the age of 18, as soon as she could, she now knows that she does not want to wait long before having children – ‘with the help of prenatal selection, because I don’t want to pass on the gene .’
Liesbeth: ‘I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to pass it on, but I experience it more as my fate than as my fault.’
Lin: ‘You didn’t know. I know now, and the technology is there.’
Lin has been in a relationship for a month, and on the second date she already started talking about Lynch. ‘It’s better to be clear about that, so that someone knows immediately where they stand.’ In a few years she wants to have children. ‘If I’m allowed to.’ To Liesbeth: ‘And then you have to be there for the birth.’
Liesbeth: ‘How wonderful that would be, I really hope to experience that. By then I’ll just throw another immune shot at it.’
The work of Lin Woldendorp (and thirty other photographers) can be seen on October 7 and 8, and from October 12 to 15 at Editie Noord, NDSM Fuse, NDSM-plein 29, Amsterdam.