The Faces of Grief

Obit-Mag.com has a daily column named, Mourning Roundup in which our Managing Editor, Krishna Andavolu, posts 'deathy' links from the web. Today's features an excellent article from the New Yorker about photographer Phillip Toledano's amazing pictures of his father during the final days of his terminal illness.

It made me remember another photo that I had in a drawer in my kitchen.

This photograph is a polaroid from a series that I shot of my mother's urn the night before we interred her ashes in a beautiful cemetery in Southeastern Connecticut. The rose is from an arrangement that someone sent to her memorial service.

I don't know why I took these photographs. Maybe it was because my very good friend Natalie turned the urn from a piece of cherry wood with her own two hands. Maybe I thought it was important for my brother and sisters to remember what the urn looked like. I always thought that I would do something with them. I did not.

My mother actually held this urn in her hands during her final days. She wanted to see it. The gravity of the situation seemed to hit her when we carefully handed it to her and helped her hold it. It was heavy. She was weak.

My brother and I placed the urn in a [very] deep hole that the cemetery had prepared for us. It was so deep that we had to practically lay on the ground, side by side, with one of each of our hands cradling it.

Maybe that's why I took the photos. So I could remember everything. All of it