My mother (92) looks at photos and notes from the estate of her loved one who lives far away. He died six months ago. They have worked together for more than thirty years.
She looks at a loving card she once sent and mumbles dismissively: “One cannot love the dead, at most one can remember them.”
I’m stunned for a moment. Of that ‘people’ and of the communication. Is that true? Maybe. It is not without reason that we say ‘I loved him’ and no longer ‘I love him’; After all, he or she is no longer there. But it is also the language itself that forces us to use the past tense, the feeling is much more difficult to complete.
In a dream you sometimes meet a dead person, recently I met my best friend like that and we hugged each other and I wondered why I was so happy and so I said randomly: ‘We haven’t seen each other for so long.’ Yes, more than six years. Fortunately, in my dream I couldn’t name the reason for that; I have ruined so many dreams by saying to the happily welcomed face: ‘But you’re dead, aren’t you?’
My mother looks at the photos with indifference. She appears in all kinds of landscapes. They appear together in a single photo, but she does not look at those photos any longer than the ones of herself alone.
Later I will look carefully at the photos. There is one of her at an airport, she is pushing a cart with her luggage, there is a bag from the Duty Free at Schiphol on top, so she has just arrived. She smiles radiantly at the photographer, who of course took that photo to immediately capture the desired face.
What stands out to me from that photo is how happy they were with each other, how in love they were. Apparently nothing comes out of it anymore for her. She pushes the photos aside and says: “I don’t need them anymore, just throw them away.”
Is that what happens with photos, or is it her thing? In any case, life has a tendency to withdraw from photographs, you are no longer that, neither are the others, if they are still there at all, they have become images of a life, somewhere, once. Not palpable of your own life. Sometimes the photos push themselves, lifeless, into your memories, you can no longer remember someone’s face, only a photo of that face. Not that you know what you would remember without those photos; faces fade, voices fade.
Memories are small, luminous sensations: you hear the sound of water against boulders, someone’s voice says one word, you see their sandals in a hotel room, or you feel the fabric of the couch you were sitting on. They are not stories, they are made of words, they go outside, while the road to memory runs exclusively inside and what is remembered is incommunicable.
The ramifications of the moment, all that ‘now’ that surrounds every photo, has disappeared.
There is a quote from Thomas Mann hanging on my bookcase: “(…) the form of the timeless is the now and here.” Yes, the now and here is timeless and all-encompassing, over and over again. And we just work to get it.
Afterwards you create a story about all that disappeared present, or you indifferently push a photo aside. “Over,” you say. “One cannot love the dead.”
Unless they are here again, just for a moment.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 25, 2023 newspaper.