I sat with Moe in his nursing home room one night in the early spring of 2015, sounds of senile and confused floor-mates mixing with the hum of TVs up too loud, mumbling through the noise and the grainy black and white of the Andy Griffith show, he told me, “I’m sorry for all the time we wasted. I love you Jojo.”

Moe and I had a unique relationship. Growing up, I never doubted his love, but I quickly figured out that the role of father was something he struggled to fill. Throughout my childhood, I watched him slip in and out of bouts of drunkenness, succumbing to his alcoholism, leaving his progress behind. He would be in my life for months at a time, and then stumble away into addiction. In his presence, his love carried me. In his absence, I lost any understanding of our relationship.

As I got a bit older, I began to slowly push away from him, and from all of the attached heartache, pain, and anger. I was frustrated by the cyclical nature of a relationship that always pushed and pulled.

As a teenager, I saw him as more of a friend than a father. I grew to understand that he wasn’t always capable of remaining in my life consistently. His pain and addiction routinely pulled him away from me. Eventually he’d resurface and make his way back into my life. As I got older, Moe and I started to become more distant and spent less time together. We’d call each other sometimes, see each other on holidays, or run into each other in public. These encounters always felt strangely natural, which confused me. The awkward tension created by absence and presence, and by the push and pull, further confused my perception of our relationship.

Moe called me one night in the fall of 2013. I missed the call. He left a message, said it was Dad, and that he just wanted to say hi. A few days later he was hospitalized after collapsing to the ground. Over the next few years his body and mind started to fade. He passed away in May of 2015, shortly after I left my college commencement ceremony.

When Moe got sick, I hid behind my camera. I was afraid to watch him change. I was afraid to witness his pain, his struggles, his confusion. More than anything, I was afraid to confront our relationship — so I hid. I began to use the camera on my iPhone to mediate the situations that I didn’t know how to process or handle. I started to break down the wall that I had constructed between us by hiding behind a new one.

Photographing him became important to me for two reasons: it allowed me to be present in situations that were utterly overwhelming, and it helped us re-form our fragile relationship. I found comfort behind the camera — it helped me block the pain of watching my father change, slip, and fade. The process allowed me to be physically present and mentally numbed. The photographs I took carefully packed away and recorded the emotional weight that I was unable to process. They allowed me to love Moe as my father, despite his flaws and shortcomings. The photographs showed me how insignificant many parts of life can be, and allowed me to see him act as a father, even as he mentally and physically slipped away.

In some of these images, it feels as though Moe is floating above his body, maybe understanding but not ready to admit that he is leaving. It’s somewhere within this space that I think I found out what it means to be a son, and what it means to be a father, to have a father, and to see Moe as my father.

Since Moe’s death, I’ve grown to miss sitting in his nursing home room, watching television, listening to his favorite music, just being with him. I’ve grown to miss the times when everything was seemingly wrong, but the love was finally right. I often look for Moe in strange places, hoping to find him in someone else’s memory. I sometimes drive by his nursing home just to say hello. Even with all of the memories and photographs, I can feel myself starting to forget him.

I was left with thousands of images, his belongings, and an understanding of Moe that I hadn’t had before he got sick. The photographs remind me of that time, of what I learned, and of all that I still have to learn. These images bear witness to a relationship re-formed. Tucked within them, they contain the love of father and son and all of what I am not yet able to fully understand, process, or remember.