Memories of my grandmother, Tsuyajyo, kindly stay with me all the time; A small purse in which Tsuyajyo collected 500 yen coins to give me and my sister when we visited her. Hide-and-seek in a morning after I stayed a night at their house.

My grandfather became sick and started staying in the hospital when I was a student. On one of his last days, I visited him and found him tied to the bed in a sterilization room after he had tried to remove a tube attached to his throat. He was still trying to move and staring at us, even though he could no longer make a sound. “He is not the grandpa you know; maybe you shouldn’t see him anymore.” Tsuyajyo told me.

Tsuyajyo began showing symptoms of dementia around 2009. It was the first time my mother experienced having a family member with dementia. She took care of her mother, who could hardly perform basic tasks like eating or taking a bath. Tsuyajyo would often get angry irrationally and became someone my mother no longer recognized as her mother. These days lasted for about two years.

In 2012, Tsuyajyo moved to a care home where she would stay for the next seven years. I started photographing this series around that time as well. While my mother passed her responsibilities to the caregivers, she would visit her mother every few days to spend half an hour there, as if it were her duty, saying, “I just wish for her to laugh once a day.” Tsuyajyo gradually became calmer, and singing her original lines became her favorite activity. I was often amazed by her laughter. I was surprised when she gripped my hand more strongly than I expected, saying, “I want to grip your hand tightly until my blood vessels burst!”

I took pictures and made notes of her unique lines so that I could remember these small moments.

In 2018, Tsuyajyo moved to the hospital where her husband spent his last days. She started receiving intravenous fluids, as she could no longer eat. She also stopped singing. She could hardly move and was there until her organs slowly stopped working on a night in January 2020, at the age of 100. My mother, father, and I were there with her. I started to feel her absence, but we all smiled, seeing her face.

I was moved by many of the submissions for this year's Me&Eve Award, photographers across the board excavated from the depths of emotion to put forth deeply personal and complex projects and where families of all kinds was one of the more common themes.

I kept returning to The Shining Lady's compelling photographs because Mitsu Maeda brought forth so much dignity, love, and humanity to her photos of their grandmother's final years. This project touches on memory and elder care with a respectful tone and highlights end-of-life rituals with a keen artistic eye. The tenderness of these photographs will stick with me for a long time.

– Leonor Mamanna • Deputy Photo Director, Bloomberg Businessweek / Pursuits

Pigment prints at 10×12 inches