It was, my cousin reminds me, once quite common for one family member or another to snap a photograph of their loved one in final repose, a keepsake to be placed among the golden locks of hair, the bronzed baby shoes, and that tiny bracelet that somehow fit on your grandmother's wrist. They would not have minded, we would like to imagine, going as they were before the Maker in their Sunday finest, faces freshly painted and powdered, sunken cheeks glowing rosy once again. In childhood, those images never failed to startle, while thumbing the thick pages of the family album -- the scene shifting suddenly from kids laughing through the candlelit glow of birthday cake, or your mother holding your sister next to a dog whose name no one can recall, to a waxen, expressionless face peering above a casket's satin pillows, its exterior dark and final. It seemed ghoulish, and perhaps selfish, the need for that one final image of one who could neither smile nor offer consent. But perhaps such clinging is not unreasonable. Perhaps I am no different, telling this to you, conjuring with words the unreliable visages of the past, endlessly attempting to name and reclaim a part of the world that has long since departed.
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