Camera Mortis: How photographs of the dead helped me mourn
yalereview.org
yalereview.org
In my case, I find that a viewing just gives me really bad lingering feelings on top of the sadness from the death. For me, it does nothing to provide closure and makes getting over it more difficult. The death event itself, actually, was very much a relief. That's what signaled closure and the end of suffering. It was the viewing that made the experience drag on for far too long though I can accept that others feel very differently.
This is weird, but I am most disturbed by the hands of the deceased. They have an uncanny unreal appearance. So much better to remember them alive. Yet other family members are able to pose selfies with the deceased, I found that repulsive and enraging but kept it to myself.
Ironically, death and it's rituals are all about the living and their needs and desires. It has very little to do with the person who actually dies.
I also understand they were taken because the 19th century parents simply had no other photos by which to remember the lost children. I’m just not sure we should be looking at them.
My first reaction is revulsion. Revulsion at posing corpses as though they were dolls. Revulsion at staying in physical contact with a corpse. A strong sense that it's incredibly disrespectful of the deceased.
I don't think the author is lying about it helping her and some others process their grief. But I have a hard time imagining it working that way for me. And it would take a lot to persuade me that this was okay even if the survivors did find it helpful.
Maybe I missed something redeeming when reading the story?
If it weren't for these photographs there would be in most cases no surviving image of these children. I can imagine as a parent there would be some burden to give your child's existence some durability.
My Dad passed two weeks ago today, and now, when seeing some of these photographs and reading this article, I get it. I might not personally need or want a photograph of my Dad's corpse in some pose (I'm quite content, to say the least, to have held his hand through his last breaths, and to have helped lift him onto the stretcher to be hauled off to the crematorium), but I can see why others might feel differently.
I hope you're doing ok.
And yeah, that demystification certainly helped. So did my folks and I (and Dad) sharing a rather macabre sense of humor. Nothing could've prepared me for rigor mortis setting in, though; few things are as weird as a human body being stiff as a log.
It's also true that many of the people I've photographed have since died. Some day my family will be left to decided the fate of these photos. I've done face tagging (more than once... grrrrr)
I do need to prune them down a bit. 350,000 photos is a bit much.
I guess even back then this might very well have been what most people thought. We are obviously only left with the photos of those who didn't think that way.
An important factor probably was that these people might have never taken a photo of their loved ones at all before, an then suddenly you find yourself in this "now or never" situation while you're not in the best psychological condition ever.
This then corrupts the database for all other tagging.