“Christ is the head of this house. The unseen guest at every meal. The silent listener to every conversation.” This calligraphed proclamation hung in a gilded frame over the front door of my childhood home. The seven of us—Mom, Dad, five kids—couldn’t help but see it every time we walked down the stairs in front of it.
These stairs connected all our bedrooms and the main bathroom with the first floor. Without question, it was the highest traffic area in our suburban tri-level home. Hanging on the off-white wall along this blue carpeted staircase was a wooden banister and a crowded gallery of frames. This wall displayed a mosaic of artifacts without pattern, symmetry, or continuity of style. Mostly photographs, some were black and white, others were faded Kodachrome. There was also a small watercolor and some folk art made by our aunt.
Some of the pieces were permanent fixtures of our mother’s collection. Others were temporary. Of all the photographs, I especially remember two. One, which my siblings and I (and every other sibling group that has one similar) consider infamous, was a large black-and-white portrait of all five VanOrt kids (the VO-5) riding horseback on a bench. From youngest to eldest, left to right, on display are five sets of bright eyes and impossibly cute smiles—except, of course, for mine. This photo, which I currently have in the form of a miniature, is a captured moment of me crashing my head into my Irish twin and looking devilishly sideways. Clearly, someone thought that was charming; however, since the day they hung that photo, I wore the nametag “problem child” for all to see.
The second photo I remember hanging over the hallway staircase was a late nineteenth-century daguerreotype of a dead baby. Yes, that’s right. We had a photo of a dead baby hanging on a wall as a decoration. I remember that it randomly appeared one day, which stopped me in my tracks during what was normally a race up or down those steps. It was a full-frontal portrait, from bonnet to booties. The baby’s dress was black like a morbid christening gown, the bonnet and booties white. Her full cheeks and closed eyelids glistened with silvery undertones. Dark lashes laced the full moons of her eyes. She was beautiful.
At first, I thought the baby in the photograph was sleeping and I thought it was totally weird that she was fully dressed. But our mother informed my sister and me that during Victorian times “it was customary for people to photograph the dead.” Especially babies or young children who didn’t live long enough to have portraits made. “It’s like a eulogy or a keepsake,” she said. “A memento mori.”
“This baby’s dead?” shrieked my sister.
Not long ago I asked my sister what she remembered about the dead baby photo. Her complete answer: “I brought it to school for Show-and-Tell.” Years later, I learned from one of my sister’s classmates who experienced the aforementioned Show-and-Tell that the photo of the dead baby had traumatized her forever!
I, on the other hand, did not experience trauma because of this photo. I experienced curiosity, and I experienced empathy. It didn’t scare me, nor did I find it creepy. I accepted our mother’s explanation of the Victorian era custom as sufficient. The purpose of the photo was to honor a life, a very brief life, and to do so in a beautiful way. And it was to remind us of the inevitability of death—although I didn’t truly understand the meaning of a memento mori until many years and many lives had passed.
The power of the visual
Even though the post mortem image has been etched in my memory I can’t remember who that baby was. What was her name? Who gave birth to her? How did she die? How did that photograph serve those who grieved her loss? Why did my mother have it? And why did she choose to hang it in our stairwell when she did? Wait, was it even a girl?
I confess this isn’t a story about a photograph of a dead baby or even the stairwell of my childhood home, and need to forgive myself for going off on a tangent. This began as an attempt to write about something difficult. It’s about the death of my parents. And it’s about the visuals haunting my memory that randomly make their way to the front of my mind.
It’s a part of the unending grieving process that can be both triggered and/or unprovoked. These quiet, isolated winter days, when the forest all around us is covered in a sparkling blanket of snow, are rich with unprovoked triggers. When we are so protected and sheltered from everyone and everything, all we have besides our daily chores, habits, and mutual interests are what goes on inside our minds.
Everything I know about my parents—and certainly the part about growing up with them on Bartlett Avenue—is stored in a visual mosaic as shambolic as the stairwell gallery. They, as individuals, are braided into the double helix of my living DNA like a third strand. In addition, everything I learned about myself through them, and certainly because of them, is alive and continues to grow in this fertile territory. It’s crammed with color and love and sorrow and joy and fear and worry and excitement and contentedness. There is an ongoing, enigmatic roller-coaster ride happening in my brain.
“Memories cannot die. They are our burden, our pleasure, and our constant reminder of who we are.”
–From A Line Between Friends (2006).
I was at the deathbeds of both my parents. Mother first. It was a hospital bed in a sterile room in St. Louis, Missouri. It was crowded, as the VO-5, our dad, and the occasional hospital associate filled the space around her bed. A heart monitor beeped, a ventilator breathed aloud while her pale, almost invisible lips surrounded a cold white tube. A piece of clear tape attached the tube to her cheek.
Whoosh, pop! Whoosh, pop! Woosh, pop!
She laid perfectly still with no expression. No forehead furrows, no crow’s feet around her eyes, no smile parentheses around her mouth. She had suffered a stroke. She was brain dead. This, I deduced, is what the body looks like when brain activity ceases. Snapshot stored.
My father’s deathbed was in a dimly lit, pastel-colored downstairs bedroom of my sister’s home in Michigan. During the last gray days of November, congestive heart failure complicated by severe anemia turned his once lean and muscular physique into a skeleton in an adult diaper. Every bone was visible. I saw the arthritis in his knees. The skin on his face was taut and sickly yellow. His lips were so dry they were like cheesecloth, and the guttural sound of his rattled breathing filled the room. It smelled like urine and decay.
I don’t have photos of my dying or dead parents. I didn’t need them, nor did I want them. The images I witnessed in the St. Louis hospital room and the Michigan bedroom are etched into my memory with even more clarity than the once upon time dead baby photograph. All I have to do on a cold winter’s day is face the snowbank outside my igloo, close my eyes, and the images come to life.
To all my friends who have recently lost their parents, I wish I could relate that the grieving gets easier. But it doesn’t. There will always be a small piece of regret for lost time or unanswered questions. Questions for which ONLY your parents would have the answers. I have several significant questions that I know can never be answered—which have not only contributed to feelings of irreparable grief but also have been a catalyst for writing fiction. (Don’t know the answer? Make up a story!)
For the record, I’m not making up the story of the dead baby photograph on our stairwell wall. She was a real person with a brief life, and her photograph did indeed serve as a memento mori. (“Remember, you must die”).
Rest in Peace.