The photo shows my grandmother. She’s among the adults at the back, fourth from right, peeping out from a row of old-timey faces. The kind of faces you don’t see any more, faces that could only come from the past. Even without the sepia tint and the period clothing, you know you’d have a hard time showing them an iPhone or talking to them about AI. Frankly, you’d have a hard time explaining ITV4.
But it is sepia-tinted, this photo, almost artificially so; its stock-still adults and fidgety kids captured in eerie permanence, so perfectly composed as to recall the cover of a stirring Irish childhood memoir. Judging by the boys and girls in their little suits and sparkling white dresses, it’s from a first holy communion ceremony, presumably one with pupils from the small primary school in Mulleek, Fermanagh, where she taught for 30 years.
I’ve been sent it by my cousin Leanne. (As my father’s second cousin she is, I think, my second cousin once removed, but I will not be receiving corrections on this point). She thinks the photo is about 50 years old, so 1975 or so.
My grandmother does look about 68 in the picture, but that doesn’t tell us much. The photographic record shows she began her life aged 68 and simply proceeded to grow smaller and older from there. There are pictures of her with my father as a baby, when she must be 39, and yet her wild hair and steely glare present the mien of a woman many decades her senior. I’ve always thought she had the implacable air of someone who’d keep her arms folded on a trampoline.
Staring at it, I feel that vertiginous lurch of the stomach I often get when looking at old photos like this; the sense that a random moment was rendered arbitrarily permanent, and with it the mind-boggling realisation that that microsecond was as real as the one I currently inhabit; the sense that her life feels so disconnected and foreign from my own, despite my existence literally depending on hers.
With a pang of shame, I must say I didn’t know the date of her death until I asked my family as we passed the photo around. Most of what I know about her has been gleaned from scattered photos like this, and stories told by my dad about his primary school days, during which she was his teacher.
She died before I turned three, so I have no memory of her. As chance would have it, the anniversary of that death was just a few days ago, around the time I first found myself staring at this photo for long stretches. Perhaps that’s why I’m so thrown by the distance I initially felt, and shame for reducing a whole life – a life which begat my own – to a comedy caricature based on snapshots and hearsay.
So I bid her apology and ask that she may rest in peace. Because 50, or 60, or 100 years from now, my descendants may be staring at a photo of me, looking comically ancient in some manner I can’t yet predict, so distant from their lives as to be a stranger.
‘Who was this guy?’, they’ll say as I flicker at them from a holo-screen, ‘you really don’t get faces like that any more.’
