This is a short monologue which uses the death of Susan Sontag as a jumping off point. Like much of the subject of death and grief, it is very personal. I can see that later on in my journey, I might well expand on this work as it feels important at this stage that my visual work which explores my own grief should have some kind of introduction.

I was reading about Susan Sontag and her terminal cancer and that her partner Annie Leibovitz recorded Sontag’s illness and death and I reflected that there was a similarity with my own experiences and project work. Leibovitz produced a huge book called “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005” which I looked out. Lebovitz isn’t a photographer I have spared much time for as I always thought her work was about photographing famous people and am less interested in fame than in ordinary people. However, when I looked at this book, I found much more than images of the famous and the rich. In her introduction she writes that in 2004 after Susan Sontag’s death she started searching for photographs to put into a little book to give to people at the memorial service. (Leibovitz, 2006) When I read this, my first thought was that this was eerily like the process Roland Barthes went through when looking for a photograph which summed up his sense of his mother. I then stepped back and thought that actually what Leibovitz and Barthes describe is a normal human reaction to death and loss. Many of us must go through exactly the same process whether looking through photographs, letters, clothes, keepsakes or even the spaces the dead people lived in, searching for a sense of what has been lost. Leibovitz says that, “The project was important to me, because it made me feel close to her and helped me begin to say good-bye”. (Leibovitz, 2006) Sontag’s son David Rieff writes that there is no sense of good-bye, “What does that leave? Closure? Again, I do not believe for an instant that there is any such thing. If there is any . . . easing, it is probably that as time passes, all the grief, all the layers of one’s feelings eventually ‘migrate’ somewhere. Or perhaps we become accustomed to our grief and, as it becomes increasingly familiar, increasingly part of the emotional landscape, it becomes a dullness. But there is no closure; no forgetting is on offer. One mourns those one has loved who have died until one joins them. It happens soon enough.” (Rieff, 2008, p. 178) I won’t argue that one point of view is more or less valid than another because death and how we deal with grief is a personal journey, unique to each of us. When my daughter died, the cancer charity CLIC Sargent sent a book about how to cope with the loss of a child to cancer. It isn’t an easy thing to read. The book speaks of things such as ‘how to get through grief’ or ‘getting back to normal’. It even suggests avoiding other parents who are too ‘morbid or sad’. (Tonkin, 2008) Maybe the value in book isn’t the quotes and suggestions it made but in trying to get parents to focus beyond themselves. I have never had the sense that I will get back to normal, what I am now is a new normal.

In an echo of my own experience of the loss of my daughter and my mother within days, Leibovitz’s father died six weeks after Sontag. Leibovitz speaks of the act of photographing Sontag’s cancer and the painful treatment and of photographing her body after death. She compares this with the death of her father who she photographed as he died at home. One interesting thing she says is that “Photographs take on new meanings after someone dies” (Leibovitz, 2006)

I have found that my exploration of why we photograph those we are about to lose is as much an emotional journey about my awareness of myself as it is of the wider subject. Is it correct what Leibovitz says that sense of closeness and of saying good-bye? The photograph at that point in time for me doesn’t sit gathering dust in a drawer. The photograph acts as a memorial and a memory trigger. It becomes part of my life story. It is part of my grief.

Death as a subject for art and academia is widely spread and can be found from the ancient to the modern world. Whether as a way of marking the place of burial or as a traditional art form perhaps with a religious view of death with a sense of an afterlife perhaps with moral warnings or perhaps as works which look at the point of death with doctor’s busy hands or a concerned family looking on or even as a documentary statements of what the reality of death looks like. No matter how art deals with the subject of death, each art work must be rooted in its culture. This seems an obvious thing but I mention it because the death and the remembrance of the dead are cultural and anthropological things. I cannot divorce my own culture with its influences through its norms, beliefs, its fears and hopes from the art which I form and research which I conduct in this field. I recognise that death in my Scottish culture in Northern Europe has shifted out of the home. Except for sudden and unexpected death, my culture pushes the point of death into the hands of professionals, whether medical staff in hospitals, care homes or hospices. The dead body is passed to funeral directors. The home might no longer be a place for the dead, however, the memory and the remembrance of the dead is, because we carry it with us, still very much is part of the home.

It is interesting to me in my own research to question why this subject intrigues me. Am I morbid? It there a question over my state of mind or my mood? If death is a normal outcome of life, then why shouldn’t this subject receive the same attention as does life? I remember my granny in Edinburgh switching off the news as she didn’t want to be forced to engage with what she saw as depressing stories. She would watch soap operas almost to the exclusion of everything else and thinking back I wonder why the good and bad news surrounding invented characters was preferable to news of real people. When I grew up, my parents didn’t censor the news and I watched stories about bomb blasts in Northern Ireland and in England and coverage of the Vietnam War. Did these stories I watched normalise death, and in particular violent death, for me? Death was something that happened to others and was shown in the corner of the living room. Death which was personal to me is not as newsworthy so is experienced very differently. My first personal experience of death was visiting my granny in hospital and seeing how tiny and shrivelled she was as she smiled and said she wasn’t afraid of her death. I was much older and thinking back it is obvious that while my parents didn’t censor TV death, they kept close death from my view. There must have been many family deaths which I wasn’t aware of. I didn’t go to funerals. Such things weren’t for children. I had a vague idea of heaven and religion which I had already started to reject long before I saw my granny in her death bed. I don’t remember having a sense of what happened to dead bodies.

My own mother had Alzheimer’s so in a way for me it was like she died yet still lived. Everything about her which made her the person I knew was gone before she died. When my mother died, I felt no strong sense of grief although as that time my daughter was dealing with cancer so my memories and thoughts around that time might not be true recollections. I visited before she died and held her hand in the hospital and was pleased afterwards, I had been there to say good-bye. For my daughter everything seemed on a different scale. I knew that her death was coming, the cancer terminal, the treatment had failed and had left behind a damaged version of my daughter so much so it is difficult to try and place her sense of herself in that maelstrom. I watched as other children in the cancer wards died and were wheeled out and their beds taken by new children, sometimes several over the course of a weekend. If these are what I was dealing with then what was my daughter thinking? Those left behind experience a sense of regret around how could I have said or did things differently. Such exposure to extreme emotions is exhausting and leaves you raw and in a state where reality and imagination, memory and experience all get mixed up. This process goes on and on seemingly without end. Three days after my mother died, my daughter died. I have a memory that I didn’t tell her about my granny dying. What was the point? Death suddenly became very very personal. Grief was no longer just a word. I was with my daughter as she died, suffering from monstrous pain and begging to die. I felt her skin wet and warm with sweat after she had died. I photographed her through her illness which is the starting point for this project. Wondering why we want to reach for the camera and what we hope to capture or preserve. At that time the practicalities of death were dealt with one at a time. Impossible phone calls to pass on the news to relatives, arranging the funeral, choosing a coffin, registering death. Later on, dealing with Government, banks and so on, all who wanted to know in case they paid any money they didn’t have to. Then what to do with everything in the house and alone with time and your thoughts and the sense of her? Life became a blur. This period lasted years. Day to day life carried on but it was if it was happening to someone else. Only when I decided to devote my studies to this period of my life, did this provide the opportunity to move on, for focus and contemplation and I was able to approach this time at a more considered pace and perhaps with a different sense of balance.  I don’t know if my experience of the sudden death of a child is shocking or extreme or out of the ordinary. My tutor tells me that such death is the most shocking in our culture and I have no reason to disbelieve what she says. People often say to me they don’t know how I coped. But then what was the choice? From my perspective, I am too close to this to be able to step back and observe with any sense of neutrality. It is too close and personal.

Was everything I have experienced a reason why my granny refused to watch the news? Close death becomes more and more common as we grow older. Was it an attempt to keep death at arm’s length?

References.

Leibovitz, A. (2006) A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005. New York: Random House.

Rieff, D. (2008) Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir. Lodon: Granta Publications.

Tonkin, L. (2008) Coping with the Impossible: In our own words – Parents talk about life after their child has died of cancer.