Modern death masks

I belong to a special group, a group of people who have lived through being turned inside out—so to speak. But this inversion didn’t take place out in the world, it took place before I was born; in utero.

The particular birth defect is called an omphalocele—and while I can write it with help from spell check, after more than 40 years of describing it, I still can’t be sure how to pronounce this strange condition.

 

For 40 years I was very alone in this medical mystery, a group of one. But several years ago, what I thought would be yet another fruitless search, found community. A community of new moms with what we call O-babies, a community of adult-O survivors and a community of O-angels because even with today’s advanced medical technology—babies with this defect often die.

 

It is these angels I contemplated last night. After a year or so in the various community groups, I decided to quit the O-angel thread. I didn’t want to look at dead babies anymore; I did not want to see the cause of someone’s extraordinary grief. I could send messages of condolences, but I wasn’t ready to be confronted by the images of the children that didn’t make it.

 

Last night as I was scrolling through Facebook I came upon a post of some cute newborn pictures. There was the floppy bow on the tiny hairless head, the scrunched-up neonate pose with the closed eyes, facing the camera; a loose-knit blanket draped over the back and shoulders.

 

The text informed me, that this was an angel, a child who had entered the world but couldn’t stay. It also thanked a photo studio, by name, for the pictures. And it was this that struck me the most; someone makes a living taking photos of dead children.

 

That’s a harsh way to put it and for the families who have lost their babies, I know these few pictures of their children are precious; but I am curious about this job and about this practice.

 

Death and the process of documenting it is something that has fallen out of favour in western society. Now we more often than not look to the possessions of the dead to remind us of what they were like in life. But a tea pot doesn’t preserve the face of the dead and the human mind fails to remember faces and features over time.

 

In a historic Gaelic house I once visited in Nova Scotia there was an unusual picture hanging on the wall. These days we’d call it a multimedia installation; at the time, I suspect, it was just how things were done. In the frame there was a mixture of elements- a palm frond cross such as you might get during Easter mass, some silky yellow fibres, and paint—in combination they made an image but not of a scene, not a place, more like a collage that pleased the eye without confounding it. It was beautiful in its strangeness.

 

I asked the docent of the house, which was part of a historic village preserved as a living museum, what the picture signified, and she told me it was a memorial. The silky yellow fibres were strands of a lost child’s hair. The cross would have been made for the funeral service. She went on to say that the Victorians, which was the approximate period of the house, were funny about death and their need to keep these morbid items in circulation within the household.

 

But perhaps, I think, it is our culture that is funny about death; trying to hide it away and confine it to a short service—leaving the bereaved to their grief never to be spoken of or seen again after the initial loss.

 

In the past people wore their grief, literally; widows’ weeds and black arm bands. And they wore them for more than a day or a week. While I don’t believe in prescribing how people should dress or feel, it would be nice if people could display their grief for more than a day- in recognition that grief takes time. We must be given the time necessary without feeling like we are abnormal for the sadness that won’t release our hearts after the death of a loved one.

 

In addition to the clothes worn by the grieving there were also funeral masks and works of art such as the one I saw, made to commemorate the dead and keep them with us.

 

In some societies, the dead reside with the living. They are part of the family; desiccated remains sit in a favourite chair for decades while grandchildren play at their feet.

 

I wouldn’t want to intertwine the lives of the living so inextricably with the dead, but I would like to have the cultural capacity to deal with death better. Perhaps it starts with pictures of angels.