Apertures

"If I had a photograph of you or something to remind me,
I wouldn't spend my life just wishing." - A Flock of Seagulls

On Saturday my father and I went to my Granny's apartment to go through family pictures. My Dad's mother is in her early 80's, sharp as a whip and can take more punishment than a Timex. Currently she's contending with a herniated disc. She recently had her eyes operated on, has an ongoing heart condition [post bypass] and recently defeated breast cancer.

Bette Davis was right. Growing old isn't for sissies.

A few weeks ago I went to my Granny's for a lunch. We had a great day, and my Dad and I agreed to come back to go through some family pictures. Apparently, my Granny had been wanting to do this for a couple of years as she's on a merciless clutter busting campaign.

I suppose I also wanted to go because at 35, my Granny is my last surviving grandparent. It's quite something to still have a grandparent at age 35 and I know that the time we have left is short.

After a lunch of delicious sandwiches, [Thank you Starbucks. I'd highly recommend the Turkey Stuffing sandwich by the way.] we started going through boxes of photographs.

I'm one of these people that can look at pictures of anything and anybody. I suppose in what I anticipate will be a well funded retirement, I will take up photography as a hobby. I was fascinated by it in grade school. I loved taking pictures, going in the red lit room and watching an image appear like magic on the photo paper.

I particularly love pictures of people. I wonder what their thoughts, hopes and dreams were when the picture was taken. I wonder if they couldn't wait to leave. I wonder if they thought anything at all. I wonder if the photographer loved their subject.

I don't know much about any of my grandparents and I probably know the least about my paternal grandfather. But there he was, a young twenty something man galavanting around Clydebank with his brothers and mates, a newlywed, a young father, a new middle-aged Canadian immigrant, a grandfather, a very sick man living out his last months.

I find as I get older that I've begun to relate to everyone completely differently. People who came before me are particularly ripe for mental rejigging. The past has been this other worldly realm, inaccessible and distant. Then I look at a picture of my grandfather taken when he was younger than I am now and his humanity becomes more relevant and tangible to me. He was a kid once too, with hopes and dreams and fears. His time here doesn't seem so distant. And it seemed to all go by in a flash.

I see my own life starting to take the same photographic shape. I see a baby rejoicing in being held by her Daddy, I see a cute blonde toddler grumpy with a black eye and waiting for a plane [I'd walked into a shopping cart. Yes. Even then I was setting the standard by which all others would be measured.] I see an elementary kid with glasses, an awkward pre-teen who thought she was gigantic and was nothing of the kind, a teenager who just didn't appreciate how pretty she was.

I saw pictures of my Aunt Jean who died far too young, who I talked to far too little and who on some days, I miss too much.

And then as I looked through more pictures, I imagined my grandmother as a singularly bright young woman who was denied the chance to go to school, who was a young mother during the Nazi blitz of the shipyards, who raised a family, who still marks the birthday of the four month old baby girl she lost to crib death, who is now a great grandmother.

Can photographs ever really impart the joy and pain of a life?

I saw my Grandmother, sitting in her chair, reliving all these photographic memories as they had actually happened and their subsequent emotional residue. At one point, my Granny was looking at a picture and said "God. I'm the only one still alive."

And I decided in that moment, that when I look back on that picture, the one where only I can remember the people in it as they were when they lived and breathed, that I want the memories to be as happy and thoroughly lived through as possible.

Life is truly too short.