A Picture of Loss

2 years through the lens of missing my son

“We are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.”

~ Ralph Hattersley

For all my adult life, I have found myself better able to connect to and reflect on my world through a camera lens. Only an amateur photographer, (and that’s being kind to my art) I don’t pretend that the images I take are for anyone but me. Framing things in this way somehow helps me see more clearly what my eyes alone may have missed.

A critical observer might surmise what I’m actually doing is hiding behind my viewfinder and using it to distance myself from realities around me, softening the images into something more digestible. I admit that has been true at times — particularly when the camera gave me something to do with my hands or allowed me to skirt around the edges of a social event under the guise of recording the proceedings when I didn’t feel comfortable engaging.

Mostly, though, I’m out there capturing for myself the things I find interesting, or beautiful or things that got me thinking that I want to remember later.

Anything in nature — decaying leaves, a dead log twisted into silvery sculpture, moss in a shade of green that makes me take a deeper breath unconsciously. Sweeping landscapes that fill me with a sense of my smallness and somehow never translate once in print.

Somebody’s street art. Colorful signage in a cityscape. The rotting wood of a sagging front porch.

Angles of a roof line with curling trim, left by a craftsman long gone but noticed by me today with an appreciation they’ll never get credit for. Poignant, I think. Who was he? Did he carve that corbel on his lathe thinking that his art would be living past him, and future random woman would wonder about him? Probably not, but in that moment, he was alive again because he left something to ponder.

That’s the thing about taking photos. They live on. For the subject or the documentarian, the feelings being felt in the moment are captured for whomever views the image. And like art or literature, they are open to the interpretation of the observer. How we see a picture is not just about what is in the picture at all — it’s about what is in us.

What is in me now is so different than what was there when I took most of the pictures in my files, and so looking at them now, I see and feel things I never imagined I ever would.

Two years ago, my youngest child left my embrace and our world, suddenly and without warning, at age 18.

In my hundreds, no, thousands of photos I took of him in his 8 years with us after his adoption from Ethiopia, his beauty was irrefutable and his potential limitless. I captured joy, curiosity, silliness, intelligence, strength, determination, satisfaction, snarkiness, humor, boredom, sleepiness, and yes, love. Especially for his sisters and brother — it lit up his countenance, his love for them. It glowed out of him like a spotlight. And I saw it in the photos I took of him with his best friends, his first friends in America, his teammates and “brothers” who came later. His connection to them jumps off the screen when I look at these pictures now.

What I never saw in him through my lens was despair, but now I know it was there because a wave of it crashed over him too hard and took him from us 731 days ago.

In the first year without him, I fixated on every image, searching for what I had missed. My broken mind obsessed over the ridiculous thought that by understanding something that was beyond understanding, I could somehow go back in time, undo it, wake up to a different reality. In the days and weeks after his death, I searched his face, his posture, the loose drape of his relaxed limbs as he smiled out at me from the photos, trying to emblazon every inch of his presence in my brain so I could feel him close to me. I hungered for more, shredded by the realization that this was it — I had a finite amount of my son and there would be no new moments to capture.

Now, at the 2-year mark without him, the desire for more and the sadness of that limitation is still there, but I find myself less crazily despondent over it. Where I am now is still tearing up some of the time, but not required to see every image through the viewfinder of a broken heart. At least, on occasion, I just see my son in these photographs in the way I did when I snapped them — free from the asterisk of loss and grateful I took the picture in the first place.

Mekbul was.

The beautiful images of him aren’t necessary to prove everything he was.

I see him everywhere, anyway. His essence and contributions to this life are not dependent upon those photographs and he is not limited by them.

Mekbul is. He always will be here, because he loved and was loved. The images help me to remember what that looked like, but I don’t need them to remember how it felt. I feel it every single day. Some days I carry that heavily, but I don’t mind. It’s as much a part of me now as my limbs. Carrying him has become my privilege, just like being his Mom was.

I am going to take many more photographs in this life. They help me see. And Mekbul won’t be in any of those pictures, but his influence will be part of everything I point my camera at. He will be there, still.

I miss you, my baby boy. I love you