Ishiguro's novel, The Buried Giant (2015) and Paddy Summerfield's decades-long photographic essay in memory of his elderly parents, Mother and Father (2014) underline the role of aesthetics in the psychoanalytic understanding of old age. Ishiguro's narrative of universal memory-loss in an archaic world and Summerfield's visual representation of the last years of his parents’ lives in their back garden, as his mother succumbs to Alzheimer's, together suggest the importance of what Theodor Reik calls “the third ear.” Reik's account of psychoanalytic listening emphasizes the role of the third (listener and onlooker) as the sensitive register of unconscious interpersonal communication. The insights of contemporary psychoanalytic writing on couples in later life, as seen through the lens of British Object Relations, offer a way to understand Ishiguro's novel and the dynamics of the family “snap-shot “in terms of the rhythms of separation and loss. The landscape of a distant past riven with ancient strife, and a garden that charts the gradual process of decline, contain the forgotten histories of our own psychic habitus and forgetting.