A thousand tears

Pictures by Mahil Wijesinghe

As much as festivals are about traditions and fun and food, they are also about family… about sharing, caring and giving thanks to the people in our lives, especially parents. Holiday images are more often than not coloured by the warmth of a mother’s love and idyllic times spent in her presence. Yet, caught in the rat race of life and constantly chasing after the jackpot called success, parents, particularly mothers, are increasingly becoming disposable commodities, secreted in ‘Homes’, conveniently out of sight and forgotten, even in times of festivities.

Times, they are a changing, one could say, for traditionally and culturally, Sri Lanka has been a society that placed great value in family. Parents looked after their children, often until they became adults and had families of their own. And the children in turn took on the responsibility of caring for their parents when they grew old and feeble. This was a cycle that repeated itself from generation to generation.

However, changing lifestyles, values and even demographics have seen the emergence of nuclear families with no space or even compassion for the excess luggage that parents have become. Where possible the ties have been cut off completely, with the parents, often mothers, consigned to homes for the elders, abandoned on the wayside and in extreme cases, consigned to dog houses in the backyard. Newspapers and television in recent times have had a surfeit of stories of progeny disregard, contempt even cruelty to parents, with some of them abandoned on the wayside and some of them consigned to storerooms and kennels and starved. The breakdown in the traditional values of family and respect of care for parents could to a large extent be attributed to the economics of modern living. Crumbling down of social values and the single minded pursuit of money has also led to the children ignoring the responsibility of caring for their parents. It is significant that the majority of parents consigned to elders’ homes and abandoned on the wayside to eke a living as beggars are from poor families.

Theirs is often a story of selfless sacrifice and shameful abandonment. “We gave our children everything, sacrificed everything to give them a better life. We safeguard them from everything and never had them wanting for anything, and this is our reward,” is often the lament of the abandoned parent.

“As a photographer, I have always focused my lenses on the nicer aspects of humanity,” says Mahil Wijesinghe, who recently visited a home for the aged in his hometown Ratnapura, and was stunned by an ugly reality he never envisaged.

“I saw the agony in the faces of mothers, who were spending the final phase of their lives in absolute despair and loneliness,” he says vividly recalling the pathetic sight of an elderly mother, in her mid 90s lie in bed in a critical condition and crying out for her children. “I spoke to a few mothers and they said they had all been abandoned by their children,” he says, claiming that one mother had even told him that her children brought her to the home for the elderly, claimed they were taking her to see some relatives.

The ‘Home’ where more than 15 elderly women live out their lives in abject misery, with no family to surround them as they await death, is just the tip of the aged iceberg, where, as the nuclear family becomes the norm more and more elderly women are being left bereft family, love and comfort.

Featured in this page are poignant images of women, mothers and grandmothers, living the twilight years of their lives in desolation and despair, surviving on charity of others and the kindness of two caretakers.

A picture they say is worth a thousand words. These pictures however, tell stories that evoke a thousand tears.