To my honey with all my love

When my great-aunt Deannie died, I inherited a gold-plated brush, comb and hand mirror that I had always admired growing up…and all of her photo albums.

Aunt Deannie was born in 1904. She left home in Dublin, Georgia at 16 to move to Chicago where she lived and loved for the next 57 years. In the same bag of photobooks was also the death certificate of her husband I only ever knew as Mr. Patton for he had died some six years before I was born. I also discovered they owned a home there, Mr. Patton, the waiter, and Aunt Deannie, the elevator operator. I suspect they met, fell in love and worked in the same hotel.

She moved to New York in 1977 when my great-grandmother (Lily) insisted she come help care for my great-great grandmother (Granny). I always felt badly because they (Aunt Deannie and Lily) didn’t get along, all of Aunt Deannie’s friends, her life, her most cherished memories were in Chicago, and, most tragically to young me, Granny died five years later, and Aunt Deannie was too old at that point to move again.

About five years ago, I was cleaning out my attic and came upon the bag of her albums. Some of them I knew very well: baby pictures of myself and my son, photo Christmas cards I had sent, school portraits of my cousins and me, family pictures from Thanksgivings and Christmases when she came to New York to visit. My dad’s weddings pictures from both his weddings. My cousins and I posing for posterity on a random summer day. First holy communion pictures. A few photos were of younger never-seen-by-me versions of my grandmother (Georgia) and Lily. There’s a black and white of Lily at a club, liquor bottles and glasses on the table, with a man, two women I don’t know and my Aunt Dutsie (raised as a sister but really Lily’s cousin) and her husband, Uncle Sonny. Another photo is of my already sad-eyed Daddy and his smiling sister at about ages 5 and 3, respectively. Another black and white photo is of my uncle Sonny, young and dapper, next to a color picture of him comfortably round and retired.

Two albums are all black and white photos of people and places I never knew, a glimpse of the life Aunt Deannie led: Aunt Deannie at the beach posing in a bathing suit and cap; standing with a group next to a beautiful Ford; hiking with a girlfriend; partying at various clubs with girlfriends, couple friends and one on a date with a very handsome young man – perhaps Mr. Patton since he appears in various photos, all drinking and smoking and smiling; friends; co-workers; godchildren; a dog that must have been hers given his multiple appearances in all the albums and a poem she included, To my dog.

As I was writing this, I went up to the attic and spent an hour looking at the pictures again. And I found one I had never seen. It is of my mother young and smiling. She is too distant from the camera for me to see her eyes. I can only hope that they are smiling, too, for on the back she had written: To my Honey with All my Love, ****. I suspect the picture was originally given to my dad. They were only married for six years, and she had the marriage annulled some years later.

Death in a photograph.

Almost every photo in the albums is a picture of death. There is one that is literally a picture of my Granny in her coffin. But that’s not what I mean. Of the people I know in all the pictures, only my mother, one cousin and the children of another are still alive.

If you think about it, every photograph is a picture of death. The moment forever encapsulated in a still image is over, never to be lived again.