CHAPTER 6

Postmortem Photography (Memory)

Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,

or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?

—Psalm 88:12

One of history’s greatest love stories is the marriage and partnership of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Victoria was the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1837 to 1901. She married Prince Albert when they were both just twenty-one years old, and together they had nine children. When Albert died at the young age of forty-two, Victoria was devastated. She spent her remaining forty years in strict mourning, living a life of seclusion and wearing only black clothing. She even had her late husband’s sleeping quarters maintained as if he might come back from the dead at any moment. The people of the Commonwealth were fascinated with the queen’s grieving process and many tried to model their own bereavement practices after hers. Never was it more in vogue to grieve than during the Victorian era.1

Helped along by the high mortality rates at the time, the funeral industry boomed. Undertakers facilitated a complicated system of bereavement rituals, thus enjoying huge profits. Funeral processions were to be elaborate and showy, with ornate hearses pulled by teams of regal horses. There were strict codes of fashion for grieving family members, particularly widows. Mourning jewelry, especially pieces crafted from locks of hair of the deceased, were very popular. “Mutes” were professional mourners hired to stand silently outside the door of the deceased and later lead the funeral march. They would carry poles draped in crape and wear black costumes along with a mournful expression on their faces.

The practice from that era that is most haunting to me is postmortem photography, otherwise known as memento mori photography. Memento mori, which in Latin means “remember you must die,” is a genre of art that includes any symbolic representation of the inevitability of death. The danse macabre was a type of memento mori, as was much of the jewelry produced in memory of deceased loved ones.

In the mid-1800s, photography was incredibly expensive. Rarely were family or individual portraits made. When a loved one died, particularly a child, postmortem photography created a way for that person’s appearance to be forever commemorated. Many people’s first and only photograph was one taken of them after they died.

The average life expectancy in America during the Victorian era was close to forty years.2 Certainly, the prevalence of childhood illnesses and infant mortality brought that number down significantly. Imagine how difficult it would be if you had to rely solely on your own faulty memory to call forth the image of a loved one. The likeness of babies who succumbed to all-too-common childhood illnesses would often be forever forgotten. Postmortem photography offered grieving families a way to remember the deceased with precision and accuracy.

Postmortem photographs from the 1840s and 1850s were almost all daguerreotypes, in which images were rendered on a copper sheet burnished to look like a mirror. They were quite expensive, and were produced as three-dimensional objects enclosed in leather or ebony cases opened by a small, delicate handle. Daguerreotypes were intimate and tender, meant to be held in the hands and examined affectionately. They featured close-ups of the dead and captured the details of a loved one’s countenance.3

Early postmortem photographs were excruciatingly realistic. Faces often bore the ravages of disease and death: pockmarks, sunken cheeks, and the gray complexion of dehydration. But as daguerreotypes gave way to the wet collodion process, photography became faster, cheaper, and more accessible. Artistic ingenuity expanded, and photographers sought new ways to make the dead look more lifelike. Eyes were painted on after development, cotton was stuffed in sunken cheeks, and bodies were even propped up to appear lifelike. One postmortem photographer from that era describes photographing an old man whose family had set him up in a big chair, put a pipe in his mouth, and lit the pipe. The family insisted he wouldn’t look like himself any other way.4

Many times, the living would pose with the dead, sometimes creating a first and only family portrait. A group of siblings would be situated around a dead brother or sister, surrounded by the toys he or she liked to play with while living. Mothers would sit, holding their stillborn infants. In large family portraits, sometimes the only way to tell the living from the dead was to look for the person whose image was the sharpest. The requirement of long exposures for taking photographs meant that any movement on the part of the subject would create a blur. The dead do not move, and so their image would be strikingly clear.5

Medical historian Brandy Schillace writes, “The camera allows for a make-believe world, a place to pretend the dead are yet living, a space where the living and dead can both exist together. It freezes time—not as it is, but as you wish it were.” This was a time outside of time, a reality outside of reality, where the dead weren’t really dead, and the living forever embraced them.

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While a postmortem photograph may freeze a loved one in time, the dead always seem to go on living in one way or another. “Death ends a life, not a relationship,” Mitch Albom writes in Tuesdays with Morrie.6 Our communion with the departed proceeds in the form of memory—memory that is obscured, creative, and now independent of the substantive influence of the person we are actually remembering. In many ways, death itself allows them to evolve and transform more than they did in real life. While the dead may be physically inert, our relationships with them move in a million different directions in our minds. The imaginary existence is always the most animated one.

In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis laments the danger of this new form of relationship:

Already, less than a month after her death, I can feel the slow, insidious beginning of a process that will make the H. I think of into a more and more imaginary woman… Won’t the composition inevitably become more and more my own? The reality is no longer there to check me, to pull me up short, as the real H. so often did, so unexpectedly, by being so thoroughly herself and not me.7

Death tampers with our memories. It reconstructs the past. Grief usually alters our recollection of someone in one of two ways. It either renders all our remembrances completely nostalgic and unblemished, besainting the person we lost. Or it sullies our memories, making the past and the person out to be worse than they actually were, villainizing them unfairly. Death is absence. Sometimes, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And sometimes, absence makes the heart grow angrier. Sometimes, it does a little of both.

After my grandmother died, I’d spend weeks reminiscing about all the good times we shared together: the long picnic lunches under canopies of rhododendron up on Roan Mountain, the times she’d French-braid my hair, the Christmases when her van would pull into our driveway heavy-laden with homemade dolls and books and toy trains. Those weeks, she could do no wrong. There was never a kinder, jollier, more winsome grandmother.

In these moments, the grieving heart won’t allow the head to think correctly or honestly about how difficult a relationship may have actually been in real life. To remember a lost loved one as anything other than a saint or a hero would feel disrespectful. In an attempt to honor their memory, you canonize them, placing them on a pedestal beyond the reach of reality.

But then there were other weeks, different weeks. At these times, I’d remember nothing but my grandmother’s faults, the imperfections she carried simply by virtue of being human in this world. I would see the impact my grandmother’s mistakes had on my own mother, and in turn, on me, and I’d become angry. It was an anger that could not be assuaged by my grandmother’s real, live, perfumed presence laughing in our kitchen or planting roses in the yard. Grandmama, in all her wonderful human fallibility, was truly gone.

In the end, this cynicism was really a form of self-preservation, a strategy to protect my heart. It was on the days I felt the sting of her death most acutely that I assigned to her the villain’s story. I made her into a person whose loss I could bear. Sometimes it’s easier to be mad at her than to be heartsick that she is gone. The world has done a thorough job of teaching us to be angry. It has not done such a good job at teaching us to be sad. We sidestep sorrow habitually in our culture and go straight to the rituals of rage: judging, canceling, disowning.

Who she becomes in my memory is really less about her and more about me. I make her into a character I can manage in my grief. I wish more than anything that she, the real her, were here to interrupt me, to remind me of who she actually was. I wish she was here to help me feel all the feelings, complex though they may be—sadness, joy, anger, love.

C. S Lewis goes on to write:

Images, I suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular… To me, however, their danger is more obvious… All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.8

The dead are not the only ones we invent stories about in the aftermath of death. Grief can also alter our views of ourselves and the role we played in the story of our relationship. Sometimes, I am the villain. Actions and inactions from the past that used to be vague regrets transform into searing remorse and shame. There are times when I hate myself for not visiting my grandmother more. I am heartbroken that I didn’t push her more to write her life story. I kick myself for not asking her to teach me to sew. I wish with every fiber of my being that I’d told her I loved her more.

She is gone, but I live on, carrying the impossible burden of all my regret, all my guilt, all the “I’m sorrys” and “I love yous” that went unsaid. As Emily Dickinson wrote:

Remorse is memory awake,

Her companies astir,—

A presence of departed acts

At window and at door.9

I live with the fact that my grandmother and sister will never have a chance to right the wrongs they’ve done. And neither will I. We are stuck, locked in a flat, achromatic snapshot of who we were in the moment of death. Meanwhile, my imagination runs wildly ahead in an infinity of color.

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Some may wonder if I am going to write extensively about heaven or the resurrection in this book. After all, the hope of the resurrection, what N. T. Wright refers to as the “life after life after death,”10 is the cornerstone of my life. I believe that the body of our dead Savior physically resurrected, literally, in real time and space. I believe His resurrection was the first fruit, the inaugural event of a coming kingdom in which we will all experience bodily resurrection. This is the foundational truth I’ve put my trust in. Jesus is alive and we will someday be alive eternally with Him. I am confident about this. On most days.

In spite of this, or perhaps because of my periodic doubts, I’m hesitant to speculate too much on the specifics of this hoped-for afterlife. I can’t even guess what a resurrected body would look like, and I’ve never been totally comfortable when people try to tell me what my sister or my grandmother or my babies are supposedly doing in heaven right now. I bristle a bit when people tell me Rachel is looking down on me proudly, or when others say, “She’s too busy worshipping Jesus to worry about us!” I tend to check out when I hear someone say that heaven gained three angels when my babies’ hearts stopped beating.

Maybe some people are soothed by specifics. Personally, I find comfort in mystery. I’d rather the afterlife remain, at least in some part, an enigma. I like to think God is able to dream up far grander things for His children than I can. There are certainly things about the resurrection that we can know, or at least put our well-reasoned faith in. Maybe I’m strange, but I’m content for the rest to remain unfathomable, like seeing through a glass darkly.

The ancient Israelites wrote and spoke with relatively little elaboration about the place of death, known to them as Sheol, the netherworld. According to many Old Testament scholars like John Walton, the Hebrew view of the afterlife in many ways reflected the surrounding cultures of Mesopotamia. The netherworld was a place of chaos, a realm of disorder and darkness. For those cultures, the concept of the afterlife was not oriented around reward or punishment, heaven or hell. One did not wonder where one would go after dying. Sheol was the only possible destiny after death.11

Walton writes, “The ultimate death came when one was remembered no more.”12 The idea of being forgotten was a fate worse than death. For this reason, the ancients of that region placed an enormous amount of importance on having a strong line of descendants in order to assure being remembered. They strived to leave behind some esteemed legacy or robust inheritance to their children.

I came across Psalm 88 the year I went to Iraq and experienced my first miscarriage. It was a season when death felt real and close all the time. Here, the psalmist speculates on the afterlife:

Do you show your wonders to the dead?

Do their spirits rise up and praise you?

Is your love declared in the grave,

your faithfulness in Destruction?

Are your wonders known in the place of darkness

or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion? (vv. 10–12)

Oblivion. The Hebrew word for it is ne-shi-Yah, and for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about it after I read it. It’s such an emotional word, one heavy with dread, vast and unknown. As I studied the word, I learned that Psalm 88 is the only place in all of Scripture where the term is used. Some versions translate the word “the land of forgetfulness.”

It appears that the writer of the psalm is wondering if it’s possible for the dead to see God’s goodness and to praise Him for it. He wants to know if God even bothers to show His love and His glory in the place of the dead. Simply put, the psalmist seems to be asking two key questions here: When we die, will we forget God? And, perhaps more poignantly: When we die, will God forget us?

It’s terrifying to think that we may be forgotten, erased by history, lost to God and to the people we love. How horrifying to be remembered wrongly, to be overtaken by someone else’s poor memory. Isn’t that why a photograph is so important? It captures an image, secures our existence. Perhaps in some ways, a photograph seems to save us from this oblivion, from the land of forgetfulness.

When I was in India, I lived in a compound that served as both a home and a school for HIV orphans and widows. One cool, rainy morning, a mother and her two children came to us for assistance. She was HIV positive, as was her youngest daughter. I’ve never seen such a sickly child. She was quite literally skin and bones, her countenance wasting away. Her eyes were dark and hollow, and no matter what I tried to do to cheer her or make her laugh, she was too weak even to smile.

I could probably mark that encounter as the moment I lost my idealism when it came to aid work. Our resources at the organization were stretched thin, and both mother and daughter were too sick to be admitted to our home. The director of the ministry wished them well and directed them to a list of medical resources nearby. Before they trudged off into the mist, I took the little girl’s photograph. A quick click opened the shutter and affixed her gaze to me forever.

We heard the next day that the little girl had died that afternoon on her way home to her village. Her name was Ankita.

I wrestled with that moment for years, the moment we sent them away. Should I have done more? Could we have simply offered them a warm bed for the night and would that have made a difference? Could I have saved her? I was twenty-one and naive, a puffed-up do-gooder whose illusions of heroism had been dashed. It was the closest I’d ever been to death. I watched a little girl teetering on the edge of oblivion. It was like she’d fallen in before my very eyes.

I wondered what would become of her now that she was gone. Surely it wouldn’t be long, a few decades maybe, before her memory vanished from the earth. By all accounts, she was an unnamed, unimportant village girl from a poor family that had become outcasts after the HIV diagnosis. In India, she was literally one in a billion. She would become a statistic, an integer added to the number of children in the world who die annually from AIDS. Who would care enough to remember her, in all her God-given specificity? Was my photograph all that was physically left of her? It was likely the only one ever taken of her.

If we all go to the land of forgetfulness in the end, there is but one hope: that God will remember us. Psalm 139:8 feels in many ways like a response to Psalm 88. It notes that even Sheol is not too far to be reached by the presence of God. That same passage tells us that God crafted each of us in our mother’s womb, knit us together with remarkable particularity (see v. 13). Death cannot change this vital fact of our existence: we are made and loved by God. I might not know what eternity looks like, but I know that it belongs to me, that it is written on my heart. Even death can’t deny me the dignity of eternity.

I learned later that the name Ankita means “marked.” Indeed, she was marked by God. All human beings, no matter their status, skin color, virtues, vices, or length of life, bear the imago Dei. They are marked with His likeness, stamped with His image. That image transcends any image we seek to put out into the world, any legacy we want to leave behind, any effigy that someone else would falsely or mistakenly fashion of us. We are loved by God not because we are good or important or deserving or heroic, but because we are His. To simply exist is a miracle. What a noble purpose, in and of itself, to simply be as a child of God! He does not forget us because He cannot forget Himself.

In Isaiah, God compares Himself to a nursing mother, one whose love is fixed on a newborn child:

Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me,

the Lord has forgotten me.”

Can a mother forget the baby at her breast

and have no compassion on the child she has borne?

Though she may forget,

I will not forget you!

See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands. (49:14–16)

We all bear the mark of God. And, according to this passage, God bears the mark of us.

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“Oblivion” is a word I clung to during my first miscarriage. It was the only word that seemed to describe the loss I was experiencing. Miscarriage is perhaps the only death you mourn in which you have no past with the loved one you lost. You have only an imaginary future. You grieve someone whose face exists only in your mind and whose name exists only as a hope.

Our culture has given us almost zero rituals for the observance of miscarriage. There is bleeding or an outpatient surgery and then it is over. You go home from the doctor’s office with ibuprofen and instructions to rest awhile. In many cases, even close family members don’t know a loss has occurred.

And what kind of existence did that child ever know? All it experienced was a life inside of mine. As Marilynne Robinson writes in her beautiful work of fiction Lila, “An unborn child lives the life of a woman it might never know, hearing her laugh or cry, feeling the scare that makes her catch her breath, tighten her belly. For months, its whole life would be all dreams and no waking.”13 For some, there will never be a waking.

If ever someone’s existence felt lost in the oblivion, it is my unborn child’s. You, sweet baby, were a part of me. I felt your presence to my very core, but I never saw you, never held you, never really knew you. Who are you and what is my love for you? Is it an apparition or an aspiration?

I can’t explain it, but the mysterious nature of my child’s existence troubled me for a long time. It was like I couldn’t understand what had happened to us. I believed that my child was an image bearer of God, despite the brevity of his or her life. We had borne witness to that child’s existence, but Tim and I felt all alone in that experience.

Maybe this is why many women stay silent, don’t talk about this type of grief. The loss feels too abstract, too hard to name. Many have argued that the ubiquitous term “miscarriage” should be replaced by the term “pregnancy loss.”14 The meaning and etymology of the term “miscarriage” can sound inherently accusatory. The first definition that Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary offers is “corrupt or incompetent management.” Indeed, many women mistakenly feel that a lost pregnancy represents a failure on their part, that they did something wrong that led to the loss of their baby. In reality, we know that most pregnancy losses are due to chromosomal abnormalities, something the mother, and the father for that matter, has no control over.

I, however, am not quite ready to lose the term. A simple Google search of the word “miscarriage” turned up a definition that actually spoke to me in my place of hurt: “an unsuccessful outcome of something planned.”

To me, miscarriage is an appropriate name, not only for a pregnancy loss, but for all sorts of losses. We make plans, live life with a person or a dream, and the future we hope for never comes to be. The outcome we anticipated is wrecked by an unforeseen cause, stolen incrementally or meteorically. We live in an alternate reality of the one we really wanted.

We mis-carry so many of our relationships, both in life and in death. Many do not come to full fruition. Relationships are a complex conglomeration of who a person is to us, what we hope them to be, and what we fear they will be. All relationships are riddled with expectations and disappointments, unrealistic optimism and unfair pessimism. Most folks are more flawed than we assume and are also more wonderful and valuable than we can ever know. No one will ever meet the grand heights of our expectations for them. And most will surprise us with goodness more than once. Like most complex human experiences, relationships are a journey.

The problem with death is that it cuts the physicality of that journey short. We continue that journey with a ghost, who can’t right wrongs, who can’t evolve. Some ghosts are too big to fail; some do nothing but fail. Dead people transform into either gods or devils, angels or demons. Few find the in-between of what it means to actually be human.

Nor do we allow ourselves to be human. We beat ourselves up for things we said, or what we left unsaid. We spend the rest of our lives wondering, “What if?” Jerry Sittser, who in one evening lost his mother, wife, and daughter in one devastating car accident, wrote, “The difference between despair and hope, bitterness and forgiveness, hatred and love, and stagnation and vitality lies in the decisions we make about what to do in the face of regrets over an unchangeable and painful past.”15

Learning to love people in death, it turns out, is a lot like learning to love them in life. No one is perfect. No one loves perfectly. To mourn well is to hold together in the space of your heart multiple complex emotions at once. Sadness, regret, anger, longing, nostalgia. All of these are holy feelings and must not be denied. Honoring the memory of the one you loved doesn’t require you to idealize them. They don’t need your patronization. To honor them means to love them because of, and sometimes in spite of, who they really were. And to honor your own sorrow, you must love and accept yourself no matter the mistakes you’ve made.

One of the most powerful things about the gospel is that it teaches us people do not have to be perfect to be loved, cherished, and grieved when they are gone. And I don’t have to be perfect to be allowed to grieve.

It is a gift to bear witness to the life of another. When I look back on the lives of my sister and my grandmother, there are moments that bring me pain. But there are moments I would freeze in time if I could. I’d give anything to go back and feel my grandmother’s long fingernails combing through my hair. I’d give anything to be a kid again, stuck in the backseat of our Chevy Caprice, crammed in with our suitcases and my sister on one of our long road trips up to the Roan or out west. I’d give anything to go back to that rainy spring day when I told Tim we were miraculously pregnant; the smell of spring blossoms was drifting in through the open windows and we were wide-eyed and unbelieving and hopeful all at the same time.

Life doesn’t exist as a snapshot. It’s more like a movie reel, moving from frame to frame, from joy to sorrow over and over again. Time takes us all to death at some point. Photographer Susan Sontag wrote: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”16

Death is voracious. It will take every inch you give it. It will rob you of the past, bereave you of your fondest recollections if you allow it. Memories that once brought joy can be transformed into tools of torture. Photographs from holidays, weddings, and birthdays are tarnished with sorrow, and even shame. You know that you’ll never have the chance to relive the happy moments. There’s a strange embarrassment at feeling like you had no idea what was coming, like you’d been caught off guard, like in all those happy moments, you should have known better or been better prepared. Death makes us feel like we’ve been hoodwinked. It’s the greatest heist in history.

We must fight with all our might to maintain the joy of our memories. In reality, the past and the present are all we actually have. The future is never promised to us. As my brother-in-law, Dan, says, “It exists in my imagination.” Death steals from me what I never fully possessed to begin with.

Perhaps in its very name, memento mori photography serves as a warning to us, a clarion call to be present in the moment for all that it is, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the hard. Cling to reality. Reminisce rightly. Because no matter our striving, our preserving, our imagining and reimagining, all things pass. All things are fleeting. Death is the common denominator of our shared fragility.

Memento. Remember.

Mori. You must die.

Remember.

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