Being a photographer of sorts, next time in the house, I photographed it without her noticing or any commentary. It spoke to me. I wanted, selfishly as we who capture images do, for myself to be part of what we encounter. Then... 

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I forgot about it. 

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Until my friend died and for some unfathomable reason she appointed me as the “personal representative” over her effects—that’s what lawyers and the courts dryly call the things that remain behind, the essence of one’s life.

 

Among those “deceased’s items of inventory” was a hand-tooled leather journal bulging with papers, articles, and notes, in addition to hand-written remarks, commentary, her writing, and an unleashed rage I had never seen in her. My friend’s big, angular writing ran off the page in expletives I never, well, rarely, heard from her and certainly not all on one page, focused to obliterate any intruder into her soul and her very—very—private life.

 

It occurred to me I had not really been there for her at critical times.  She, as with everything scored and scarred in her, kept what mattered most close to her heart. She used to say she was “Old Testament”,  believed in an “eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” I never quite believed she possessed that raw passion for revenge, self-recrimination and examination, and the ambition to leave her mark. But reading these pages now—I became a believer. Is it often we don’t know someone until after they’re dead? So many stories, but what stood out was her quest for understanding the life and death of her mother, an all-consuming search that was to ultimately leave her hungry and unfulfilled. 

 

The journal contained no solipsistic whining or “complaint”—more like keening—that ancient Celtic sorrowful grieving howl or lament. It seemed poetic—shortly before her death her DNA testing had revealed a surprising percentage of Celtic and Scottish heritage, although she had been disappointed, hoping for that lost connection to Hungarian vineyard keepers or ancient Jewish resistance fighters or a Baroque cellist who had played for Bach—something exotic, definitive, and rebellious. 

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I remember when she finally took the DNA test. She had been skeptical, fearing the results would reveal an inherent weakness of character or resolve that was genetic, the fear it would infect her as she had struggled all her life for survival and needed some ancestral lineage that possessed backbone and grit––someone to be proud of. She wanted the fairytale she had formulated to be true. “Just one I can claim for myself…all I’m asking, one blood hero,” she had said once as an aside. Now I understood her need.

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A death certificate from the 1950s slipped out of the journal, her mother’s, with stated cause of death as self-inflicted gunshot to the heart. Age 34. Several pages were devoted to the terror of witnessing that act and the abandonment that followed...at age six. How did her own heart not stop in that moment as well? 

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Pages later, an explosive rant against feckless friends in adulthood who had questioned her “authenticity” for telling a slightly altered story of the loss of both parents. She scribbled in bold black ink—“Who the fuck really wants to hear how it really was?”—and—“No one has the right to my story unless I care to share it.” She had determined a palatable story that imparted the essence—a great loss, a tragedy, a trauma—that shrouded the rest of her childhood, if not her life. No one was owed the details.

 

The corazones began to make  sense.

 

Her loss informed the deep sense of sorrow she rarely let surface. Losses were part of those corazones––lost dreams, lost loves, and lost lives.