Photographer

beauty that comes out of people when they accept who they are,” she said. “It’s altered how I look at myself and how I see others.”

Shortly after our first conversation, in early August, Clarke, now 82, found herself at another turning point with the death of Sazevich, 93, who had lymphoma and refused chemotherapy. The couple had been together since 2003 but hadn’t married.

Sazevich had fallen three times in the months before, broken his hip, contracted pneumonia in the hospital and returned home on hospice. As he lay in bed on his final day, receiving morphine and surrounded by family, two dogs belonging to one of his daughters came close, checking on him every hour. At the moment of his death, they growled, probably because “they felt a change in the energy,” Clarke said.

“It was amazing — I have never been through

an experience like that in my life,” she said about Sazevich’s death. “There was so much love in that room, you could cut it with a knife. I think it’s changed me. It’s given me a glimpse of what’s possible with humans.”

Everywhere she goes in Inverness, Clarke runs into people who tell her how sorry they are for her loss and ask if they can help.

“I am overwhelmed by the care pouring over me from my friends and family,” she said. “It’s like a huge embrace.”

It takes a community

to comfort an older adult coping with loss, just as it takes a community to raise a child. Clarke said she is still “up and down emotionally … questioning what death is” as she processes her loss.

Eventually, Clarke said, she wants to restart work on “Time As We Know It.”

“Because it’s about aging me,” she said. “My aging. And that’s what I’m committed to. It’s given me a purpose. And when you’re growing old, you need to have something you love and makes you feel alive.”

COURTESY OF MARNA CLARKE Marna Clarke and Igor Sazevich decorated their home last Christmas, when he wasn’t feeling too sick. “Igor had an incredibly beautiful home and a knack of making cozy spaces out of rooms with high ceilings,” Clarke says.

COURTESY OF MARNA CLARKE Marna Clarke photographed her partner Igor Sazevich’s shirt one morning when “this lovely light” was shining on it. Now, the photo is a symbol of his absence, she says.