Memories
Originally published at Examorata. Please leave any comments there.
Last night when I got home after a nice evening out, I sat down in front of the TV for a little while. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was on one of the cable channels, and I was sucked in easily enough. It was near the end of the movie, and even though I love these movies - and the books on which they are based - very much, the language rang strangely in my ears because I hadn’t watched them in a long time. By the time I tuned in, Frodo and Sam were very near Mount Doom, walking up it in fact, and Sam stopped to comfort a fallen Frodo. Frodo spoke about how all his memories and comforts have fallen away, how he felt “Naked, in the dark, with nothing - no veil - between me and the wheel of fire!”
For a moment I wanted to laugh, but it caught in my throat. Those movies, coming from those books and that rich, strange world created by J.R.R. Tolkien, were something my father and I shared together with great joy. He read me the books when I was too young to understand, but I came to them myself as I grew older, and when the movies were made we were there, year after year, on opening day. Watching even a piece of the movie last night took on a special meaning since it was almost Father’s Day, the second since my father passed away.
Frodo’s words therefore reminded me of something I’d thought more than once since my father’s passing. My grandparents have all passed, and my father as well. We have a very small family, the few aunts and uncles I have are scattered geographically and we are not all close, personally. There are few bulwarks of family left, in other words, between me and a clear sight of my own mortality. Of course there are no rules about who goes when, but the fact of the matter is that my generation is almost on the front line, in a manner of speaking.
This in itself is all right - it is the nature of time passing, and of life moving on from generation to generation. However, in recent weeks I’ve grown to realize something else that’s been happening. I haven’t been taking pictures as much as I used to. Sure, dragging the camera out at family gathering after family gathering over the years results in a lot of similar pictures - here we are around the table, here’s someone cutting a birthday cake, here’s someone trying to tie a ridiculous pair of Christmas antlers to the cat’s head. But I don’t even have many of those pictures from the last two years.
I suppose I understand why it’s tempting to stop taking the family pictures when the family has lost an important member. Each new picture could be looked at as another reminder of the lost. But that’s not the only way to look at it. The pictures we take now, of a smaller family today, but perhaps of a larger one in the future, the pictures also of loved ones related not by blood but just as dear - they’re not really a portrait of what is gone at all. They’re a celebration of what we still have, the life that is precious and vital and still amazing, despite all we have lost.
There are lots more pictures, and more joy, yet to come. For today, and for Dad, I’m going to share this one of him, though. (From a trip to Deep Creek Lake, summer 2007.)
