Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep: A Mother's Remembrance and a brief look at modern memento mori photography
The black-and-white image centers on a tiny fist–thick with delicious pudge and creases of fat on chunky fingers. These are prime pat-a-cake hands, ready for kisses and wrapping around grown-up fingers as the tiny body it’s attached to stumbles through its first steps. The squishy digits clasp a silver ring, some made-in-China disposable that would go on to be eternalized in more ways than its humble origins might have foretold. Another image peeps a passerby look, as if stealing a glimpse through a telescope, at a sleeping face, partly obscured by life-saving measures, another tiny fist, and, this time, a shock of dancing hair. Of the memories I have of that day, Boston’s hair might be the most vivid, those soft whispers of red like the summer wind that carried him away. While, admittedly, these aren’t my most treasured of photos, they tell a story and light a legacy that otherwise might have been lost with me. They’re the only professional photos my baby ever had. In the ...