Lynne Breitfeller: Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow

Lynne Breitfeller: Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow by Aline SmithsonAugust 30, 2026

©Lynne Breitfeller, Wedding Kiss

Today Is Yesterday and Tomorrow by Lynne Breitfeller is an intimate exploration of love, caregiving, aging, and loss. The work reflects Breitfeller’s experience caring for her parents, both living with dementia, as illness and aging gradually transformed their lives and her role within the family.

As their primary caregiver, Breitfeller witnessed the loss of independence and the slow changes that made her parents increasingly unfamiliar, while her own sense of identity became intertwined with caring for them. Documenting the experience became a refuge and a way to process the frustration, tenderness, isolation, and privilege of caregiving.

Through her parents, Breitfeller came to see aging with greater acceptance and to recognize the enduring bond between two people who had shared a lifetime together. Today Is Yesterday and Tomorrow is ultimately a meditation on care, love, memory, and loss, and on the ways love can persist even as everything else changes.

©Lynne Breitfeller, Lynne is Coming

Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow

Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow is an exploration of my journey as a caregiver to my parents, both living with dementia. My father underwent treatment for prostate cancer in 2018, and I took him to daily radiation therapy for months. In 2019, my mother had heart failure and needed a pacemaker. From that point on, I became their primary caregiver. They were able to live and function in their home.

Caring for them has brought profound challenges and quiet rewards. Documenting this journey has been a refuge—something steady to hold onto when frustration mounted, and life felt pulled in too many directions. Ensuring that they were looked after with compassion and patience was a privilege, though caregiving often brings isolation. Over time, my sense of self often blurred in the constant tending to another’s needs.

There is a particular ache in watching those you love slowly change into unfamiliar versions of themselves. Being so close to my parents in their later years has helped me see aging with a kind of acceptance. Their love for one another has remained constant, sustaining them despite fading abilities. I see them now not only as parents but as two people bound by a long, shared life. Through them, I’ve come to understand more clearly how care, love, loneliness, and loss are tightly intertwined.

In 2023, I moved my parents into memory care when their needs had grown beyond what I could provide, and they could no longer safely live on their own. My mother died a few months later. My father remains there. Though he may not mention her during the day, at night he sometimes calls out for her. This experience has reminded me that love persists—even as everything else shifts and seems to vanish.

©Lynne Breitfeller, My parents enjoying their meal to the last drop

Lynne Breitfeller is a New Jersey–based photographer whose work explores the nuances of everyday life, with recurring themes of human relationships, memory and loss, the passage of time, transience, and humor. She received her B.A. in English from William Paterson University and studied photography at the International Center of Photography and Los Angeles Center for Photography. After a two-decade career in textbook publishing, she returned her photographic practice.

Her work has been exhibited at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Vermont Center for Photography, Photo Gallery, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, and Montclair Art Museum, among others. She was recognized as a Photolucida 2023 Critical Mass Top 50 photographer and has had solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography and Lagstein Gallery. Her work has been featured in Lenscratch, Fotofilmic, Analog Forever, Silvergrain, Black + White UK, SHOTS, and All About Photo.

Instagram: @lynnebreitfellerphoto