When I shot these photos, my mother was convalescing at the Charleston Area Medical Center (Charleston, WV). My father and I were both taking pictures. Her lunch had just been served, but she didn't have much of an appetite at the moment. The US Open was being broadcast on the television. Dad and I were staying across the street from the hospital in a cheap hotel. Mom was recovering from open-heart surgery. She was heavily medicated. Dad was very much agitated and at times disoriented. The CAMC, it was announced the week I visited, was being downgraded from a Class 1 trauma center to a Class 3 trauma center. Although they tried to hide it, the staff were very much demoralized. Our health care system is in great danger. Litigation, profit margins, whatever the problem is, the best medical system ever for fixing catastrophic wounds is being run into the ground, and people are suffering and dying because of it... daily. It's difficult to see one's parents struggling to live through illness. It's also completely right. Everybody ages, and illness and frailty attend great age. It was hard for me to forget about my obligations, all that very important business, which was happening someplace, anyplace, elsewhere. The urge to run out and get laid was strong throughout my visit. I couldn't tell at times whether my desire for escape was sympathetic or all mine, all mine. For a couple of days (the worst ones), my mother in her half-consciousness, would try to get up and go home, go to the bathroom, go to buy a car. The only things that prevented her from doing so were the straps on her arms and the IVs perforating her veins. If the straps weren't on, she would've pulled those IVs right out. The attractive power of flight in moments of crisis obviously is a definitive human characteristic. The hounds were on her and my mom wanted to run, run, run. Only a couple times did she turn on us with the fury of a trapped animal. All one can attempt to convey to a sick loved one at moments like those, are messages like: "I am not Death," and "I love you," and "It's OK...It's going to be OK." It was difficult to face the fact that my parents were just as vulnerable to death and disease as anyone else is. I was afraid of losing them. This may not make a lot of sense, but my parents' stories were never closer to the surface than they were in that hospital room. No matter how upside down it all got, my parents articulately expressed their humanity, their fragility and strength, their reality, under the duress of Mother's illness and recovery. I think Damien Hirst and the others who've less ambitiously leveled their aesthetic cannons at this target have nearly completely missed the mark. I think it's because irony and transgression are less powerful than the drama to be found in the houses we've built for our individual and collective struggles for survival, of birth and death. Those guys love to ride the pointed finger at this quarry, but it's only because they don't have the courage to face the beauty and emotional power inherent in the scenes played out there. That beauty and power can not possibly be sterilized, because it is the root, it is quintessentially human. It is the scene where the body and spirit wrestle for primacy, and it's as old as people are. The technology and social approach are radically contemporary, but the roles are yet the same. Love and prayer made the difference in my mom's recovery, not irony and transgression. Those artists will one day die. Wonder what they'll want in the room with them when they croak their last?