Memento Mori

I was happy to see among my mothers photographs, a picture of my father in a place that I had been. This is a little parking lot, next to Wister Lake in Oklahoma. I had stopped there myself many times, just to take in the view. I had no idea that my father picked the same spot. It was an odd and happy coincidence. Though I was never at this place at the same time with him, we had both been there.

My brother asked my mother for a photograph of my father for his living room. Mom found one that I haven’t seen yet of dad holding a tomato, next to his gargantuan tomato plants. The woman at the photo place asked her if she wanted it cropped. The suggestion was normal, but, actually it would have negated the purpose of the picture. He was really proud of his tomatoes. After having an enlargement made, my mother noticed the date-stamp. It was taken on July 26, 2000, exactly three years before he died to the day.

This was a strange coincidence. But my mother took it in stride, hoping that the picture would help my brother cope. The day after she told me that story, I read this bit from “History Begins at Home” by Meir Wigoder:

The “transitional object” such as the blanket the child does not wish to part from because it confers security and comfort is an example. The infant recognizes the object as “not-me” during a period when he starts to realize that he is separate from his mother. Clinging to the blanket provides the infant with a symbolic representation of the mother, which enables her to exist in his mind even when she is not present. This is the beginning of the infant’s capacity to distinguish between reality and phantasy and it opens up an intermediate area of experience, which enables individuals later on to keep inner and outer experience, subjectivity and objectivity, illusion and reality both separate and yet interrelated. Thus we can speculate that the family portrait can serve as a transitional object during the process of mourning. The photograph of the deceased person, while serving to keep the memory alive, also, and particularly, helps the grieving person to understand that the dead will no longer return.

The occasion of the essay was the death of the author’s father. Yet another strange coincidence.