The Inner Spirit
My elderly father holding a buttercup in 2010. My father was in the terminal stages of Alzheimer's then and was once a keen gardener, so the picture has a particular poignancy and symbolism. He rarely got outside then but on this beautiful summer's day my sister Fionnuala and I took him into the garden of his care home, and Fionnuala showed him the buttercup, He took it in his hands and looked at it, and I could get a sense of him thinking about the beauty of the object and what it would have meant to him in the past. It also looked like a little butterfly and seemed to symbolise the freedoms he no longer had.
