All I've Got Is A Photograph

Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2010-
Somewhere I think I remember an anecdote about how primitive tribes don�t want their pictures taken because folklore has it that it steals their soul. I think it must have come from an old Tarzan movie, rather than a reputable source like National Geographic. It can't be true. How would a "primitive tribe" know what a camera does. It�s not like there were Fotomats in the Congo at the turn of the previous century.

I went over to my mom's house last month . My brothers and I decided to get together to look through all the old photo albums , and reminisce about our childhood. My mom seemed to have photos of every relative, be they close or distant , since George Eastman invented the film roll.

There were three collodion tintypes from the 1880's that we had never seen before. They were not well marked. They had all been taken over a hundred years ago. They were beautiful, one-of-a-kind pieces of history.
Finding a photo taken over a 100 years ago in a box it�s a little like saving a bit of someone�s soul that was tossed away; just an ordinary day years ago, reinstated as nostalgia many decades later dissolving the obscurity .


One of the photos was of a child. On the back it was written in pen and ink calligraphy that she had died of blood poisoning at 14. It was my mother's aunt .
Another was a photo of a young man in uniform and on the back it was written that he had been killed in World War I at 21 years old. He had been my mother's uncle.
The third picture was of an older couple with no notations. We didn't even know exactly which set of great grandparents or aunt and uncle they were.

It made me think about the universal human process .
The unknown man in the picture made that discovery that all men make about their fathers sooner or later; that the man before him was not just an aging father, but was once a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own.
Whoever originally owned these tin photos had experienced a sadness that had taken over their lives.. The immediate relatives of the people in the picture thought , for a very long time, that they would have to live with that permanent despair. It is the universal reaction.

I saw a photo of me and my first car , a brand new yellow Mustang convertible.. I suddenly thought of my aunt Vera, my Godmother. She was my dad's sister , the youngest child of the family. She was beautiful and kind. Her life was taken away from her at 47.

It's funny how sometimes an emotion you haven't felt in years, an experience that you would have forgotten about , is triggered by something. Your emotional "memory" kicks in , a feeling whose opening riff begins pulling all your other neurons after it, like a dog on a leash rushing as you open the door. "Emotional memory� is a valid explanation for occasional oddly out-of-proportion reactions to things.

I remembered how I had gone to the hospital to visit her as she was dying of cancer . I walked into the room and looked at the shell of the woman I loved. She was in a coma. She was down to 80 pounds and had no hair, and her breathing was labored.

The next day I walked into the room, but it was empty. It was before cell phones, and no one had called me, no one had time to tell me that she had passed away while I was on my way to the hospital. Someone was removing the bedding and cleaning the floors. I hoped that there was an explanation , like they had moved her, but I knew that was the most pathetic form of self delusion.

I walked out of the room, down the hall and into the elevator , in a fog. I tried to hold it together until I got out of the building . I sat in the dim underground garage in my Mustang convertible for a long time, coming to grips with my loss. I felt a crushing weight on me , dark and heavy like coal being crushed into a diamond.

Perspective comes through incongruity. If you wait long enough, you see that redemption and perspective was waiting there beneath your grief... .Humans have developed complicated and culturally determined grieving rituals that no doubt date from at least as far back as the Neanderthal burial pits that were consecrated tens of thousands of years ago. It is essential, not unhealthy, for us to grieve when confronted by the death of someone we love. We are not unique. Elephants and other mammals have their own ways of mourning too

In time it was replaced with a peace that surpasses that understanding that her absence only rendered me, again, the person I�d always been. Her proximity had left me a better person. She was the reason I began volunteering for the American Cancer Society when I was 20. Now she is a distant image that guides me like the North Star, but is never reached . They say I look just like her. I have now passed her life span, and I am going to finish the life she never got .

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