Wednesday Wonder: Just a Story of Love

I want to think seriously about what I can accomplish

with what's left of my life.

~ Edward Toledano

In late 2006, after his mother's sudden, unexpected death, Phillip Toledano became his father's caregiver, only then discovering that this once "ambitious" and "driven" artist had no short-term memory. Dementia not only had been stealing his father's mind, little by little, more each day; it was instilling a disquiet that left his father feeling lost and Toledano himself determined to make the most of the remaining time father and son might have together. 

They were each other's only family. Phillip Toledano is an only child. 

Toledano, a photographer who lives and works in New York City, turned to his camera to record his and his father's last shared days, creating a deeply moving photographic journal, Days With My Father, that he subsequently (late 2008) began posting on the Web. The site has been visited by more than a million people, several hundred thousand have posted comments; thousands have sent Toledano e-mails.

For three years, Phillip Toledano took pictures and loved his father. What he produced, he says, is not a story about illness or getting old or dying, though the narrative touches on all those; it is, at both its simplest and most complex, a love story. 

Edward Toledano died in 2009, in his own bed, in his own home.

I feel lucky to have . . . left nothing unsaid. To know

that we loved each other, nakedly, without embarrassment. . . .

~ Phillip Toledano

The photojournal Phillip Toledano created has been published as a book, Days With My Father (PQ Blackwell, June 2010).

Phillip Toledano's Website

Phillip Toledano on Twitter

"Off the Shelf: Days With My Father" in The New Yorker, June 10, 2010