The memory ritual
My mother decided it was time to part with her bulky photo albums, which couldn’t fit into the few shelves in her new apartment. She wanted her five children to gather and choose what they wanted to keep. I thought this could be a challenging exercise, as the past isn’t easily shared through photos. One will like this one, but another will also want it.
I imagined the wisest course would be to digitize everything. It’s a long process, but it’s already bearing fruit. As I digitize, I send this and that to a private chat group, asking my mother or my sisters about photos that aren’t dated, marvelling at photos I hadn’t seen, and especially seeing myself again in the past I tend to forget so easily.
My sisters remember more than I do, and my mother’s memories seem intact. She explains various photos, confessing that seeing these pictures has more of an effect on her than expected. At her age, she thought she had tucked everything away. Her photo albums were left sleeping in a corner of the basement, buried under other things.
A few days ago, she confessed that she now hesitated to part with these albums so quickly–that she took pleasure in revisiting this past with her husband and children. She appreciates what I’m doing all the more. Modern technology has its perks, and digitizing will, for a while, prevent dust from erasing our fading shadows.
We have an online album visible to all. I’ll complete it with some of the digitizing I’m doing.
I’m probably at that age when remembering is important, as it acts as a fertilizer, enriching the faded soil of my existence. The photos that touch me most are from my twenties. I see in them a young man dulled by his youth, who, it seems, wasn’t fully able to savour it. As I mentioned earlier, I have very little memory. My memories are built more from impressions than from facts.
I like this photo with my father, taken in 1981 at the family home. I was 22, attending university, and madly in love with a boy who put me through a lot of emotional turmoil. My family knew nothing of it. A few months after that photo was taken, I left for Toronto to escape that boy I lived with, who alternately warmed and chilled my ill-prepared heart. I can't blame him. Love is both flower and blade...
It’s all so distant now. I don’t even remember the dog in the photo. I know it existed, but that’s about it.
I built the house we see in the background with my father and some workers eight or nine years before. My father paid me twenty-five cents an hour. By the end of the summer, I didn’t buy skates but a typewriter…
I’m glad to find all these photos and grateful that others preserved for me these frozen witnesses, allowing me to retrace the steps of events.
I wasn’t very close to my father, and as a man of his time, he wasn’t someone who confided. My life as a young, romantic, and shy gay man couldn’t have made conversation easy back then.
As I noted to my mother, what now brings me closer to my father isn’t what we lived together or the words we exchanged. I resemble him increasingly, and my aging, in some ways, mirrors his.
And then, I watched him die. I heard his last words, expressing his surrender. It’s undoubtedly my most comforting memory of him, as, of course, it’s been less than two years since he passed.
Nevertheless, that photo of me smiling beside him reminds me that I had a beautiful childhood and a good life with him, my mother, and my sisters. It’s a testament we want to pass on. Though being loved doesn’t guarantee a beautiful life, one can only thank, two-thirds into life, the bodies and hearts that sowed in us the strength to be here.
Photos are more than paper. They are drawings of memory, an imprint that may not hold much weight in the cauldron of existence. And yet, looking at them, one feels that one’s soul rediscovers a mood and moisture that sometimes seems so rare. Je me souviens (I remember), says the province. We certainly don’t remember enough.
