Picture of mortality

Flipping through countless Easter pictures of my friends kids on Facebook. Most of the pictures alike; kids searching for eggs, kids with Easter baskets, kids in new Easter outfits. Easter in North America. A random click on a cousin's profile and new pictures. More kids; his nieces along with their parents and grandparents in the traditional "group pose" on vacation in Hawaii. I don't flip through this picture though. I pause on it giving it both my attention and emotions. A mixture of shock, nostalgia and happiness. Maybe it's because I miss the people in the photo. Maybe it's because I'm caught off guard about how much the girls have grown. Maybe it catches my attention because I'm jealous. I would LOVE to vacation with 3 generations of family in Hawaii. Port Clinton in July of this year will just have to do eh Dad? But I'm sure that the photo catches my eye because I have a similar picture downstairs.

Later this summer I'm planning on doing some photojournaling. Preserving the stories behind some family photos. I have a how to book that encourages picking out the photos and spending some time with them. Putting them in a visible spot and really examining the details. So I've started with a random one taken 36 years ago at our summer cabin. It's my uncle, my mom, 2 older cousins and myself. Mom and Uncle T sit in those old aluminum framed lawn chairs with the webbing; the boys and I are in various states of play in front of them. The sun shines in their eyes. My mom is wearing a chenille bathing suit because it is after all 1974. A random picture of every day life, or at least life on vacation. Life on vacation tends to move itself in suspended animation yet go by all too fast. To the little girls in the Hawaii picture it's their Dad and his first Daddy when Daddy was about their age.

Of all the pictures I have to work with I think I chose this one to start photo journaling with because I see just a glimpse of my cousins and myself as we are now in our parents. Like a reflection in shard of mirror. Not in how we physically look like them, but how we are becoming them. Or are they becoming us? Whatever it is for a fleeting second I'm reminded of their humanness. Maybe it's just because they're dead that I usually only think of them as parents. But in this hot summer day picture I'm reminded that they were real people. Parenting was one of their many roles. But in addition to that they were real people. My Mom was a woman who had sex, who missed her Mom and may or may not have loved shopping. (Part of the "deal" of losing a parent at a young age is that you don't get to learn any of these things about them.) As John McCrae said in "Flanders Fields" We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved... Soldiers, my parents, my hospice patients, my homeless brother; all human; all loved and were loved. Easy to forget, good reminder.

The other reason I chose this picture is because my mom and my uncle are dead. They have been for 15 and 28 years. Cancer took them both. But of course they didn't know that back in 1974 and that's what scares and fascinates me. They had no idea what the future would hold. Susan Sontag said “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”

Their vulnerability scares me because I can relate to it. How many random pictures do I have that some day my kids will look back on and say "that was before............" "If only we had known then what we know now........." Yes I know that all of this should make me vow to live every day to the fullest. All the great country music song stuff like "Live like you were dying." And some day it will. But for now it freaks me out a bit. Honestly I'm afraid of dying young and leaving my kids behind. I know they'll be ok if that should happen. I'm proof of that; I have cousins who are proof of it, I have a step daughter and I'm still in contact with the children of 2 precious friends who died waaaaaaay too young. Knowing that death at a young age can and does happen makes me confront my own mortality. If it could happen to them it could happen to me. “Parents, however old they and we may grow to be, serve among other things to shield us from a sense of our doom. As long as they are around, we can avoid the fact of our mortality; we can still be innocent children.” Jane Howard.

And what if I don't die young? What if I DON'T share the same fate as my mom and uncle? What if I get old? Without a picture of my own mom at 70 then I'll be honest and admit that getting older without her as a road map kind of scares me. As the class of 1990 approaches our "cough" 20th reunion there's a new question on the horizon for the first time; aging. There's a line in another song that says "I still remember when 30 was old." Heck I do too! And honestly I think that 40 is old. But it's gaining on me. I looked up an ailment the other day on line that basically said "well, that's what happens as you approach middle age." MIDDLE AGE? MIDDLE AGE?! Maybe it's my work with hospice that's making me think "when I get old, when I prepare to die I'll do....." How did that question get in my head? It's sort of like 10 years ago going to an endless string of friends weddings and thinking "when I get married I'll............" Or making a birth plan for having babies; this is what I want this is what I don't want.

I've mentioned before "The American Book of Living and Dying" by Groves and Klauser who maintains that the dying are teachers. I'm not at the point with my hospice work or patients where I can say that I've really learned cues on how to live and die well. Yeah obviously I've picked up the belief that hospice is the only way to go, that I want a Do Not Resuscitate order, I want to take my own quilts in and a moving picture frame. But other than that not much yet. Maybe I've been too busy learning the ropes to take the time to be observant but it will come I'm sure. For now the knowledge that I'm mortal and that everyone is human is a start. Loved and were loved..........