The Waiting Room of Grief
David Lintern
David Lintern is a photojournalist, photography tutor and writer living and working in the Scottish Highlands. His words and pictures appear widely in environmental and access campaigns as well as news and outdoors media. He’s the author of The Big Rounds, a social history guidebook about fell running.
These images were made in the space of a few days as I cleared my mother's house after her funeral. The location is an old tree nursery marked for development on the edge of a town on the south coast of England. I slipped away from clearing out the flotsam of a lifetime at dawn or dusk for some air. It was somewhere I visited with my mum, then walked her dog when she was unable, and so while these pictures were made in a week or less, they gestated over about three years beforehand.
They show an in-between place, a (so-called) liminal landscape, somewhere between states, a place that mirrored my own state of numbness. It felt very much like the waiting room of grief. As anyone who has lost a loved one will know, you don't really know how to react. There's no road map.