Over a year ago now, we lost my Dad to cancer. After he passed away, people often asked my sister and me whether we were worried about our Mom. Thankfully, neither of us were, and we have her friends to thank for that.
My Mom lives in a beautiful, peaceful place and over the years has built a fierce and supportive group of women around her. Knowing that she has these ladies in her corner means that both my sister and I know she is okay, even with me being thousands of kilometers away in Cape Town.
Watching how these women showed up for her through her own health struggles, through life’s ups and downs, especially when my Dad became very ill, got me thinking.
As a photographer, I often photograph best friends in their twenties and thirties. Women at that age seem to instinctively understand the value of celebrating friendships. They’ll organize photo shoots together, buy them as gifts for one another, and make time to create memories. But somewhere along the way, many of us stop doing that.
Why don’t we photograph the friendships that have lasted decades? The women who have seen us through marriages, divorces, children, grief, illness, career changes, and everything else life throws at us. The friends who know all our stories, have seen us at our best and our worst, and still choose to stick around.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how little I see this kind of thing. When I went looking for inspiration for this shoot, there really wasn’t much out there. Plenty of family photos, engagement shoots, maternity shoots, and photos of younger friends, but very little celebrating these lifelong friendships.
And that feels like such a shame.
Because doing a photo shoot with the people who walk alongside you through this strange and wonderful life isn’t indulgent. It’s meaningful. These are the people you can call at 3am and know they’ll answer with, “Do I need to bring champagne or a getaway car?”
The story behind these photos comes from my Mom. Some of these ladies met more than twenty years ago. Others joined the group through a local book club. Over time they became a constant in one another’s lives, supporting each other through the loss of husbands, the loss and relocation of some dear friends, health scares, celebrations, and all the ordinary moments in between.
They started out as what my Mom calls “the bubbly group” because they loved getting together over a glass of bubbly. At one of their early gatherings, Althea decided she was going to teach everyone how to sabrage a bottle of champagne. For those who don’t know, sabrage involves slicing the top off of a bottle with a sword.
Apparently this required extensive training, a fair amount of determination, and the sacrifice of numerous bottles of bubbly in the pursuit of perfecting the technique.
Today these women are all in their seventies. They still laugh together, support one another, and show up when it matters. They are, for all intents and purposes, family.
These photos make me smile every time I look at them. I even got a few photos of myself and my Mom taken by one of her friends. I wasn’t prepared to be in front of the camera and don’t love myself in the images, but I know that I am going to cherish these images one day, regardless of how I feel I look in them at the moment.
I hope you enjoy the images as much as I do. And I hope they remind you of the friendships in your own life. The people who have been there through the best days and the worst days, and everything in between.
And if you’re lucky enough to still have your Mom around, I hope they remind you to appreciate the people who make up her village, too.
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Photography: KAT GRUDKO PHOTOGRAPHY
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