Artist: Polly Gaillard

Project: December and Everything After

Description: December and Everything After looks closely at end-of-life suffering with a lens on the artist’s aging parents. The images included here follow the steady decline of Polly Gaillard’s mother since 2014, when she was found to have a slow growing abdominal sarcoma. By documenting her mother’s stroke, dementia, compound wrist fracture, hip fracture, hospice, and opioids treatment, Gaillard contemplates elderly care in America and the debate surrounding a person’s right to choose life and death.