At The Wake of My Namesake

It is my intention to explore the inner workings of a particular family photograph in relation to the past, present, and future, as elicited by a profound confrontation at the wake of my Grandfather.

            I plan to begin this essay with an anecdote that serves as a metaphor for a certain trauma that accompanies photographic realization and subsequent retrospection of one’s past in relation to their present and inevitable death. This anecdote will explore an event when I was young, riding on the back of a bicycle my cousin was piloting. We were riding in a parade fashion, about five or six bicycles long as I watched my older brother Ryan peel off into a ditch on the side of the road. I can remember smiling with the realization that such trauma would never affect me, sitting so firm on the newspaper rack of my elder cousin’s bicycle. Shortly after this realization one of my dangling legs found it’s way into the spokes of the rear bicycle wheel on top of which I was suspended.

            After this initial anecdote is explored in relation to the events prior, during, and after, I plan to discuss a particular family photograph that was made a year prior or before this traumatic event when the entirety of my family was together, perhaps for the first time, and captured by a photograph. This photograph pricks me one thousand times over. It is in reference to this photograph that I will dissect the punctums that are folding in on themselves. My intersection with the present and the past. This family photograph that was made so many years ago is on this day revisited. There we are, the assembled entirety of a family I am one with, at our shared place of retreat simultaneously staring at the same and different things. But now, on the occasion of my Grandfather’s wake, this most solemn day, does the photograph finally grab me by the throat. I am staring myself in the face. That self staring back, who sat front and center on that day we were all together. For the first time, in the wake of my namesake, we trade our gaze. My family surrounds me in our current configuration, aware of the dwindling entirety. The individuals react to their former selves. Their likenesses still, staring in preparation for this moment of confrontation. The countenance assumed (then) is the countenance received (now) by that same/different self during this future/present. Simultaneously they are staring at the same and different things.  That version of me, present then, staring at me now, will be staring still at me long after this particular event has passed. That version of me, my former/current self, will continue to pose as I did on that day staring at this moment and others in the future. That gaze is both ignorant and immortal. In this liminal cacophony of intersecting histories is a present. Stepped with an aura that considers every waking moment between that and this one.

            This wake, and subsequently the photograph I reference resonate much deeper in that my name is on the placard of the funeral home’s directory. I share the same name, right down the middle with my Grandfather.  He is my namesake. He gave life to my father who came to give me life—my own referenced by the representation of my Grandfather through the likeness of his name. I live this wake through the lens of my own death, through the lens of my own waking life.