A reader shared an article with me that deserves to be more widely read!
The article, by Nora Lindström, appears online at spacedaily.com.
The lede grabs me, as this is something I think about regularly when mulling over the future of my digital archives, including family photos and recollections, along with the memories, the sights, sounds, smells the photos draw from the depths of memory. My parents and my sister are long dead, but they are still embedded in my memories, and when those are gone they will die a second death. Every generation must face this, but it’s different now that it is our time.
Margaret is seventy-three and keeps a photograph on her dresser of her father in a wool suit, standing on the steps of a Glasgow tenement in 1952, holding a cigarette he hasn’t lit yet. She can tell you what his hands looked like before the arthritis bent them. She can describe the particular way he laughed when something genuinely surprised him, a sound she says she hasn’t heard come out of any other human in fifty years. When she dies, that sound dies. Not the photograph. The sound. The texture of him at twenty-six, standing in a doorway he no longer stands in, alive in a country that no longer exists, held only in the soft tissue of one woman’s brain.
This is the bereavement no one schedules. The 1950s generation — those born roughly between 1946 and 1964, depending on which demographer you ask, which is itself a contested act of naming — is the last cohort whose lived memories of their parents include those parents as young adults. They watched their mothers in housedresses on linoleum kitchens. They watched their fathers come home from factories and offices that have since been demolished or converted into lofts. When they go, those parents go a second time.
Most discussions of grief end at the funeral. The cultural script tells us that mourning has stages, that there is a beginning and a middle and something resembling an end, that you eventually integrate the loss and carry it forward. What the script doesn’t account for is the slow second death of the dead — the moment when the last person who remembers them not as a name on a stone but as a young man slicing an apple, a young woman braiding her hair before a mirror, finally stops breathing.
