by Brian Dillon
¶ Last things
During those long evenings when I stared at these photographs, there was one which I used regularly to let slip to the bottom of the pile unexamined. I found it almost impossible to look at it for long. The final photograph of my parents was taken in the early summer of 1985, some weeks before my mother died. It is also the last image I have of my father; there were no more family photographs, and I have no idea what became of my parents’ camera in the five years between their deaths. In fact, it may already have vanished, been hidden away where it could no longer remind us of a time when we had faced it without dread. This photograph, before me now, was taken by my father’s sister, in the living room of her house, five minutes’ walk from ours. It was, I think, a Sunday afternoon, and my parents had gone, as usual, to see my aunt: this time without my brothers or me, who would all have been preparing for (or perhaps already in the middle of) school exams. I can trace no other photographs from the same occasion, so I must assume that my aunt passed this one on as the sole example of an image which would by this time have become noticeable by its rarity. I have no way of telling when she might have handed it over: whether it joined the rest of our familial photographic collection before or after my mother died. If the latter, then my aunt must, I assume, have given it to my father much later, in the knowledge that it was not only the last photograph of my mother, but a unique reminder of how she looked towards the end of her life.
It was already some years since we had given up taking photographs, and I can imagine that as my aunt produced her camera that afternoon, my mother would have protested. I cannot blame my aunt for insisting on taking this picture; we might all have grown used to my mother’s objections to having her photograph taken, but I don’t think we quite understood the extent of her discomfort. Captured for the last time beside her, however, my father clearly knows the degree of that pain and reticence, her sense of being exposed to a vision that recorded too clearly the evidence of her decline. She has recently been in and out of hospital for months, as several of her symptoms worsen and require interventions which, here, she has done her best to hide.
My parents are sitting in the corner of the room, side by side on a pair of ancient and, I recall, extremely uncomfortable armchairs that have been pushed together so that they are close enough for my father to put his right arm round my mother’s shoulders. His hand stretches towards her upper arm, but only his fingertips rest on the fabric of her blouse, as if any more insistent touch might injure her frail body. But also, the gesture is quite unfamiliar to me; there is only one other photograph in which he reaches out to her like this. My father sits stiffly back in his chair: I have the impression that he too is ill at ease with this now unaccustomed ritual of the photograph. His faint smile is a touch too strained; he looks as though he has had to will himself to project even this modest sign of assurance before the camera. Although I know that he is not yet aware of the precise seriousness of my mother’s current condition, I cannot help wondering if he has guessed that this will be their last photograph together. That certainty, I know, is for him only a matter of days away.
My mother, too, is attempting to smile. Her discomfort is more obvious; even this slight movement of her features has revealed the stiffness of her face: the lines around her mouth that have in recent years been for her the most visible signs of her disease. Or rather, amongst all the symptoms that have assailed her, this has been the one which she would focus on when faced with a camera. She insisted at such moments that she could not let herself be photographed looking, as she thought, so much older than her years. At the time, I could not see the disparity that so disturbed her; now, looking at this photograph again, I can see that she looks considerably older than fifty (the photograph would have been taken a few weeks after her birthday). But the more insidious and dangerous attack on her body is taking place elsewhere, in an acceleration of all the symptoms that have slowly debilitated her over the years, joined now by invisible but (as my father will soon be informed) definitive and irreversible developments. She has crossed her arms so that her left hand is hidden beneath her right elbow. She is concealing a bandaged finger from the camera. The circulation in her hands has got so weak that the tissue has begun to perish. Sometime in the next few weeks, she will have this fingernail removed: otherwise, she will be told, gangrene is likely to set in. Still, this is not the worst of her agonies. Her slim figure has shrunk to an emaciated shadow: her throat has contracted and she finds it horrifyingly painful to eat. Meals have become, for all of us, ordeals of vigilance and intermittent panic, as she is in danger of choking on the smallest morsel.
Here, in the photograph, she is even frailer than I recall. And I am amazed, given how thin and ill she looks, that she retains just enough of the poise that sets her apart in the earlier photographs I own, to rise briefly above her failing body and face the camera with a dignity I know, in her situation, I could not possibly discover.
I cannot look at this image without relating it to the photograph, taken perhaps twenty-five years earlier, of my parents crossing O’Connell Bridge. It is not merely that these are the only two photographs in which they appear alone together. For years, I now realize, I gazed at that earlier photograph in order to avoid looking at this one. I mythologized it, turning it into an emblem of what I had lost, when really (and I knew this, dimly, each time I passed over the last photograph in favour of the first) the truth I was looking for was here, in the vision I could not bear to contemplate because it seemed so brutal, so obvious a reminder. Now, in their twin evocation of an intimacy I can find nowhere else, the two pictures seem to stand out and frame the rest. But more than that, they return me to the essential mystery of the whole collection: that here, in the paired gazes of my parents, I fail to discern what future they are, together, facing. The photographs (all photographs) say to us that their subjects are alive and dead at the same time. I look at my mother’s face and think: she is dead, and she is going to die. But what I cannot find there is a hint of what she might see in front of her. This is the terror that I could not face in the years when I refused to look at this photograph: the feeling that that future was entirely open, that the hopes or fears I might imagine I had caught sight of there were unverifiable. With the first photograph, my own existence was hanging in the balance; with this one (a much more fearful conjecture) everything was both certain and atrociously unfathomable at the same time. I look at this photograph and can hardly bear the real presence I find there; for it fails to settle into the consoling, monochrome distance of the period photograph. It is still palpably present, too tangible, too physical.
BODIES
‘There was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say “This is he” or “This is she”. Sometimes a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke with nothingness.’
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
‘The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly, because the world touches too hard.’
— Don Van Vliet
¶ Mortuary
In the last photograph of my parents, taken a few weeks before my mother died, I thought I had discovered the image of her that was both the full stop to a life and the capital that set a coded sentence in backward motion, into the past, where I might recompose a story that ended there: in muted colours on a Sunday afternoon as my father’s hand reached out gently to rest on her shoulder. But in truth, it is only the last image before the last: there is another picture waiting for me in a place I hesitate to revisit. The photographs seem to baulk and stumble before this final hurdle, a memorial suffix I must, despite my reticence, attempt to append. The image I am thinking of now is unphotographed, but also so frozen in my memory that I can register it only as a silent tableau, a distant and static moment, emulsified by regret. It is actually the last image of my mother which I can call to mind, and perhaps it is so difficult to focus on it
because it demands that I step outside the series of frozen photographic moments and into another time: the time of real loss.
There is something intolerably abstract about the language of funerals, a grim syntax that depends on adding a spurious and abstract definite article to actions which are horribly physical: the memorial, the service, the burial. Of these, ‘the viewing’ is surely the least honest or accurate: a phrase that seems, euphemistically, to defuse a terrible reality and at the same time to turn it into a grotesque spectacle. By what ruse of word and thought do we transmute our being in the presence of the dead into an experience merely of seeing? What desire is answered by this transformation of death’s physicality into a purely visual event? And what do we imagine, faced with this vision, that we are trying to remember, or to forget? The body? A ceremony? Memory itself? There are funerary traditions whereby it is apparently quite normal to photograph, even to film the proceedings: but on the day that I am now trying to picture, such rituals would have been unthinkable. Instead, I recall only this dreadfully circumscribed and labelled act of seeing.
‘The viewing’ was quite unexpected. I’m certain that nobody had explained to me the morning’s itinerary, or even hinted that the car which arrived too early for my half-awake body would take us not straight to the nearby church but to the hospital where my mother’s body still lay. I remember clearly a moment of realization as the car turned in the wrong direction, and the passing streets began to look quite unreal, the morning shoppers who turned to look at the car almost comical in their double-takes, looking for a hearse and a body that weren’t there. The journey was soundtracked in my head by the idiot chorus of a song that I loathed (‘Shout! Shout! Let it all out!’) but that at least allowed me, for those hushed minutes in the car, to find an object for my anger, fear and embarrassment other than the scene I came, in slow panic, to realize was waiting for me in a mortuary room at the end of the journey.
A photograph of that room, taken from my point of view, would have been mostly a perplex of shadows, a confusion of lurking and indistinct bodies whose outlines I cannot picture at all. Nor do I remember the prayers which must have been voiced, or the responses of the mourners to a priest (my mother’s cousin) whose authority assured them of an order, a ceremony, taken, thankfully, out of their hands. I remember only what I did not want to see: an open coffin at the centre of the room, and my mother’s face. There is only this one point of light, condensed around a being who has become, in fact, only a face. This is what we are here to view.
Do we ever truly see, or remember, the corpse of a loved one? It seems to me that on that morning, stranded in a glum adjunct of the hospital where my mother’s life had ended a few days before, we were gathered not around a body but before a face. The face is perhaps as much of a reminder as we can bear: the failed body safely hidden and adorned, except, I think, for my mother’s hands, which I can no longer see but which a more abstract memory tells me were clasped above her, holding a rosary. The face, we tell ourselves, is as if sleeping. What do we hope to find there? I don’t believe that my stunned sixteen-year-old mind, on that July morning, was subject to this speculation, but I do recall that as I looked at my mother’s coffin my gaze seemed to fracture. And at the same time I knew that what I was looking at – this face which did indeed (the cliché was true) look as if it were sleeping – was about to become an image in my memory. Was that why we were there: to be able, later, to remember this moment of remembering? The thought was unnerving, discomposing, and I remember that at that instant I felt that I had let my mother down, had failed (just as I neglected, on that day and for many years afterwards, to weep for her) to live up to the kind of memorial ritual which she herself had recently described.
I remembered my mother returning home from the funeral of an aunt and describing the old woman’s face: a face, she said, from which the years had fallen away. At the time, I had been secretly appalled by the thought of my mother’s gaze on the body of her dead aunt, quite unable to imagine a state of mind for which a corpse could be anything other than an image of physical horror and mortal fear. I had never seen the faces of my dead grandmothers, and cannot now recall whether I saw the corpse of my father’s father eight months before my mother died. Looking at her face now, I simply did not want to remember what I was seeing. I spent the day trying hard not to let the sights that assailed me impinge, to become the kind of spectacle of which I might one day say that my mother had looked, in her coffin, young again.
So conventional is the observation of death’s strangely rejuvenating effect on the faces of the deceased that it is almost a disappointment to come across it in the pages of Proust, a writer so alive to the intricacies of mourning. We have already seen him make a link between photography and death; here, however, is its intimate, detailed expression. The narrator, after a long absence, returns, unannounced, to the drawing room of his grandmother. Instead of the beloved grandmother of his memory, he sees, ‘sitting on the sofa, beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and common, sick, lost in thought, following the lines of a book with eyes that seemed hardly sane, a dejected old woman whom I did not know’. He immediately compares this terrifying vision of his grandmother with a photograph, as the antithesis of a scene charged with familiarity, intimacy and memory:
Of myself – thanks to that privilege which does not last but which gives one, during the brief moment of return, the faculty of being suddenly the spectator of one’s own absence – there was present only the witness, the observer, in travelling coat and hat, the stranger who does not belong to the house, the photographer who has called to take a photograph of places which one will never see again.
Marcel’s grandmother looks like a photograph precisely because she no longer accords with the image of her in his memory, and also because it is obvious from this scene that confronts him that she is going to die. The grandmother suddenly occupies a pure present and is therefore fated to pass from that present into death.
An hour or two after the grandmother’s death, the family servant, Françoise, combs her hair, which had always seemed less old than her face,
only tinged with grey. … But now, on the contrary, it alone set the crown of age on a face grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the swellings, the strains, the hollows which pain had carved on it over the years. … Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips. On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her down in the form of a young girl.
The vision of his grandmother as a young girl is, of course, an image that Marcel has never actually seen: her dead face shows him not his own memory of her but an imagined face (or perhaps, yet again, the face of an old photograph). The dead face lures him into a time in which he does not belong.
We might conclude from this passage that the memorial scene I am trying to describe is a treacherous one: the face of the deceased drags us back into an uncertain, unverifiable experience of time. But it shoves us forward too, into a future in which we know the image before us will itself furnish further memories, possibly just as unreliable. When I ask myself if I really saw the dead body of my mother in the mortuary of a Dublin hospital in July 1985, the question is not a historical one. I know I was there; but what exactly did I see? My most vivid memory is the violent certainty that I was seeing all the wrong things, that I was incapable of bearing the weight of the memories that pressed down on me like the mortuary’s low ceiling.
I was already terrified of what I might remember. A few days earlier, my father, my brothers and I had been hurried, on arriving at the hospital in the early morning, to the room where my mother was dying. My father spoke to her quietly, telling her that ‘the boys’ were there, and I am sure that for a moment (though a nurse told us she was unconscious) she opened her eyes. The nurse led my brothers and me to a waiting room, where my father’s sister, perhaps a silent hour later, asked us
if we wanted to go back to see my mother again. Or rather, she asked me; and I said no. My aunt assured me: ‘You can remember…’ I wondered what I was supposed to remember. Later, around midday, one of my mother’s sisters came to the nearby pub where an uncle had taken us to eat, and said: ‘She’s gone.’
And so I have no memory of my mother’s death. Instead I recall these adjacent images, fragments of an experience I was already trying not to remember. Out of the gloom of the mortuary – which may very well have been brightly lit; I remember no more than the patch of light at its centre – only two images loom with any real clarity. At some stage in the proceedings, there opens an expanse of silence out of which my father moves towards my mother’s body. He kisses her face and, turning, gestures me towards the coffin. I have, at that moment, absolutely no idea what to do. I move towards my mother and lean over the edge of the coffin to kiss her cheek. But I am quite unsure whether that is what is required of me. I don’t remember the kiss at all, only this: the feeling that I am at the centre of some vast geometry of embarrassment, that a crowd of vigilant shadows surrounds me. I am gripped by the awful suspicion that if I have done the wrong thing (perhaps my father simply wanted me to join him beside the coffin), my brothers will follow my lead, and we will have performed a dreadful – macabre, unnecessarily demonstrative – action, a gesture quite spontaneous for my father but somehow overwrought and out of place for his sons. I have no notion what my place is in this unexpected ritual, no idea how to behave before a body which seems a reminder only of my distance from my mother’s death. And so my most lasting impression of that moment is one of unconquerable shame.
