One Photograph at a Time

One Photograph at a Time

I was nearly ten-years-old when I saw the first photograph of my mother. She had died four years earlier and since then, I hadn’t seen her face.  I was forgetting what she looked like. 

The photo was of her in a white satin wedding gown. And as I looked into her soft eyes, brown hair tucked under her lace veil, I could almost hear her voice, feel her touch.  This one photo had brought my mother back to me. 

Prior to that all traces of my mom had been “snuffed out” in a blink of an eye, one May night when she died in a house fire along with my three brothers and a houseguest – my sister’s college roommate –  taking with them every photograph and possession we had. That fire erased our family history. At least in the way histories are documented with photographs and heirlooms like our christening blanket handed down through a couple of generations, one of my brother’s high school’s track and field trophies or my older sister’s prom corsage pressed into an album. There were a couple of exceptions to our loss: an Irish Lace tablecloth that had been sent out for laundering and a few pieces of my mother’s jewelry found in the ashes. Everything else, every single thing was gone.

 In those years before seeing that photo of my mother, friends and extended family had concentrated on helping us survive our loss. But in their kindness they had thought that by never speaking of our family or sharing photos they had of them, they were somehow sparing us further grief.

But our increasing questions about our mom and siblings gave these same relatives and friends a clue about the sadness we felt at the not knowing. So they started sending us a photo here and there of our mom and brothers and telling us stories about them. We’d learn our mom was always the first one up on the dance floor and that 16-year-old Richie had been a wild man who could run as fast as the wind. 

But more than the stories, it was the photographs that brought our family back. I would spend long periods of time with an eye like a magnifying glass, combing over each and every one of the few photos, looking for clues of I’m not sure what. It was through viewing these snapshots that the people in them became real, came alive.

My twin sister Patti and I now have a baby picture of ourselves. It’s a black and white image of us in a christening gown – Patti in the dress, me in the under slip – each of us wearing a tiny set of pearls on our wrist and neck.  This picture tells me a story of our mother, dressing us with care in this special garment and adorning us with these pearls for our Baptism and it gives me a peek into who my mother was and how she had an eye for detail; after all, who puts pearls on infants? I look at that photo and can feel her love. The Christening gown itself had been passed around through our family for a few generations and had been at my cousin Trissie’s house for her own recent Baptism the night of the fire and so survived.  Cherished, it is still passed around to kids, grandkids, great-grandkids.

Another photo, a black and white high school portrait of my eighteen-year-old brother Emmett sits on my living room shelf. He gazes into the distance, so handsome in his crew cut and sport coat, with the same nose my mom had, the same beautiful nose my niece Molly now shares. His dark, bushy eyebrows  now sit on the faces of my own three sons. He was a freshman at Fairfield University when he died. Emmett smiles in this photo with eyes bright. I stare at every angle, at his square jaw, his necktie slightly askew and wonder, what were his dreams?   In that snap of a moment he had no idea what lay before him and my despair is I can’t stop something that has already happened from happening. I can’t look at that photo and freeze time for him. I can’t un-perish the perished.

 I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me that’s the reason I currently have 22,625 photographs on my IPhone with 2,825 videos, images from just the past four years, the age of my cell phone. Or why I have boxes and boxes of photo albums and loose pictures not in books sitting in my garage.  No one needs to explain why my living room cabinets are stuffed with cd’s of snapshots and videos capturing nearly every year of my life with my family.  More valuable to me than pictures are to most people, they are a lifeline.

This is my inheritance, something shared with Paul and Maryann, my twin sister and my father before he passed. It’s not something we’ve acknowledged out loud to one another but the five of us have spent much of our lives taking photographs as a way to re-create our loss. For me and my crazy family are trying to insure that at least one thing that happened to us that May night can’t happen again. We may not be able to replace those lost images but we can insure we build our own.  

On any family trip, the five of us whip out our cameras or iPhone to each capture separately, the same, exact moment as if our lives depended on it. 

 “We’re all taking the same picture,” I laughed at my dad and siblings some years back when we were at Lake Louise up in the Canadian Rockies. Looking around at each other we all cracked up but not one of us stopped shooting.  That had been my “aha” moment when I realized the five of us couldn’t stop ourselves or each other from our picture-taking. 

Normal people stuff pictures into draws to stumble over  later in life while packing up a house for a move, but for us they have been the re-building of our family history, of our own children and grandchildren and each other. Books of photos sit on our coffee tables, commemorating special events. They don’t collect dust. If we’re visiting each other, you’ll find us sitting with these books open, reveling in the stories they tell.   “Let me show you some pics,” is part of almost every conversation I have with my siblings. 

 After the fire when our dad had a new home built, he chose the same site as our former home. And he made sure to have a pull down movie screen installed in the living room, this at a time when we had not one single picture, not one slide nor home movie to show on it. While our new home’s physical foundation might have been brick on the outside, the real foundation was his faith and optimism and that’s how we moved forward, how he re-built our lives.

  My father started right away to replace our lost memories with lots of new photographs of holidays and every-days.  “Here’s the wing on the right side of the plane,” he’d say years later after a trip abroad with our step-mom. Clicking to another slide he’d say, “And here’s the left wing.” People who weren’t family members would groan out loud but me and my siblings had our eyes fixed on the screen. We loved each and every picture, no matter how boring.

And my husband and kids have learned to be patient with me as I assemble everyone together capturing yet another holiday or moment in time.  “Mommmmm!!! You can’t be seriously taking another picture?” they collectively grumble but they know complaining won’t stop me.   What they don’t realize is that when your past is erased, you do everything in your power to hold onto and document your present. One photograph at a time.