by Leah Hennel
ROCKY MOUNTAIN BOOKS
2022/$32.00/252 pp.
We don’t commemorate pandemics as we do wars. Perhaps the pain is too great, the enemy too small and too invisible, to want to remember. Award-winning photojournalist Leah Hennel attempts to counter this tendency in Alone Together, a book, she writes, that depicts “a small but representative sliver of the pandemic in Alberta.” As a photographer for Alberta Health Services, Hennel followed the pandemic’s start in March 2020 through to the devastating Delta wave in the fall of 2021. “I’ve covered a lot in my career,” she writes. “But never anything this heavy, this important.”
In black and white photos, Hennel captures the fear, struggle and suffering felt by the over 27,000 Albertans hospitalized and over 4,600 Alberta families who lost loved ones to SARS-CoV-2. The photos carry the profound weight of ordinary Albertans’ hardest moments and the incredible diversity, strength and compassion of the healthcare workers who care for them.
One series of photos tells the heartbreaking story of Dixie and Chuck Dover as Chuck was hospitalized, eventually succumbing to the virus. Hennel visits Dixie back at home, now alone, who tells her, “I reach over and he’s not there… it’s very hard.”
Hennel shows the Delta wave with raw images of double-bunked ICU rooms and unconscious patients draped with tangles of tubes, wires, lines, monitors and pumps. We see troops of PPE-clad and masked healthcare workers surrounding ICU patients, gingerly proning the sickest onto their stomachs to help every oxygen molecule reach COVID-ravaged lungs. An iconic, widely reproduced photo shows ICU physician Dr. Simon Demers-Mercil, on his knees, in scrubs, head buried in one hand, a phone receiver in the other telling yet another family that their loved one just died. Even now, to me, it is the truest representation of the grief we’ve endured as healthcare workers.
Far from only bleak, however, the photos also capture the hope that came with the first vaccinations against COVID-19—perfectly captured with a young woman painting the word “hope” on a vaccine clinic’s wall. A section of the book shows the variety of ways vaccines were distributed to protect Albertans. We see nonagenarians with party hats and teenagers in grad dresses happily receiving vaccines. Other images show parents holding children’s hands as they nervously eye nurses armed with needles. The book ends as it began, mixing triumph and despair, with grateful patients back in their homes, again embraced by loved ones. The only colour photo appears last and shows Louise Smyth blowing out her 98th-birthday candle on a cupcake—a huge grin on her face. Alone Together gives us a raw, honest, brutal but also beautiful gift—remembrance.
Dr. Gabriel Fabreau is a Calgary internal medicine physician.
