A writer reflects on a sepia-toned photo of their grandmother from a First Holy Communion ceremony, prompting thoughts about the passage of time, the disconnect between generations, and the fleeting nature of memory.
Sun 12 Jan 2025 10.30 CEThe 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.
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.
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.
FAMILY GRANDMOTHER OLD PHOTO TIME MEMORY
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