Fading Photographs

When my mother passed a few years ago, I inherited two large boxes full of photographs – family photos, old pictures of old houses and cars and places, old pictures of old people. A few were identified with a name written on the back, but most were not. Some were correct, some not. In my mother’s halting hand-writing, with failing eye-sight and a faulty memory, she had identified childhood photographs of me as my brother and my brother as me so who knows if the others are correct or not.

The other day, with nothing pressing to do, I broke out one of those boxes again to try and correctly identify people and put some kind of order to them. It's a futile effort as I didn't know most of the older individuals who have long since passed on and the ones who knew them have passed as well. It always makes me sad. These individuals had lives they lived, laughs they shared, stories they told, love and fear they felt and life choices they had to make. Some of those choices they made affected my life - where I was born, what religion I was taught, how I was raised by the people they raised. Now, they are dead and buried and forgotten underground with nothing to mark their resting place but maybe a broken headstone and weeds. I couldn't help but think, when an old person dies, it's like a library burning down.

Why am I sitting on a mule in the snow getting 

my picture taken with this man identified as 

 Pa Kerly? There is no 'Kerly' in my family.

While sitting on my home-office floor surrounded by all these photographs, somehow a smell I remember from my childhood came to me. It was a very distinctive, sickly sweet smell. At one time when I was quiet young, we lived next to a horse processing plant. That was back when they killed and processed old and broken-down horses to be used for glue-making and other processes. I would wonder over to the corrals and look at all those horses and dream of being a cowboy. Occasionally, one of the workers would lift me up and put me on the sway-back of one of those poor creatures. The horses never seemed to mind and rarely moved with me on their back as their spirit had long ago been broken and used up. Sometimes the man would lift me up from one horse and place me on another, then slowly lead the first horse into one end of the big shed and I never saw them come out of the other end even though I always watched closely.

That smell of death that came drifting to me through the years to where I sat in my modern office with all the modern electronic machines I feel I need to keep me informed, warm, cool, dry and comfortable caused me to reflect on why I felt a need to identify the people in these long-forgotten photographs. Maybe it's me I'm actually thinking about. I don't want to end up like them, just a little footnote that nobody pays attention to or actually cares about.

I have a lot of digital photos I've taken and I have them all cataloged in several different ways on different mediums all backed up in triplicate. And I now realize, as I'm edging closer and closer to my own end-of-days, I'm probably unconsciously using these photographs as a barrier, individual bricks in a fence against my own mortality. After all, no one is dead, truly dead, until no one remembers them and no one speaks their name. But that's life though. It's the way it's supposed to be. And so I took those stacks of old photographs and put them all back in their cardboard box, still unidentified, still forgotten. I printed out a few of me and put those in there too, unidentified. Maybe someday someone else will pull them out and think, "I wonder who these people were? What were their stories?"