A few years ago, as my children and I looked through a photo album of my childhood, we came across pictures of my mother, their grandmother, in the last few months of her life. As we flipped the pages, the photographs showed a woman who was once young, grew older, and then was visibly ill. As I turned over to the next page, I saw pictures of her body in the casket and her funeral.  

I’m not sure if others do this, but in my family it is quite common to take pictures of the deceased. I’ve always found it to be an odd practice, but it’s done in nearly every Polish family I know. 

I quickly covered up the picture of her body with my hand to prevent the kids from seeing it. 

“What was that, mama?” My youngest asked.

“It’s a picture of my mama’s body, after she died.” I could hardly speak the words, overcome by memories of that autumn.

“It’s okay, I can see it, I’m not scared.” Her tiny three year old voice assured me.

“Oh I know, I know you’re not scared. It’s not that.”

“Why don’t you want us to see it?” Asked her older sister.

I pulled the picture out of the plastic sleeve and set it aside, face down. 

“I don’t want you to know Babcia Ewa (grandmother) that way, I also don’t want to remember it.” 

I closed the album I was holding and reached for an older one, the one with our family from back home, my great grandparents, grandparents, my mother as a child, a youth, a young woman. 

“This is who she was,” I smiled, “a lot like you when she was a little girl.” I described what I knew of the people in the pictures, assuming I recognized them, or their names were written on the back of the photos. We looked at my mother’s early life, images of her smiling, laughing, a few where she was grumpy, and some where she was pensive or sad. She was all of that, every emotion. I didn’t think images of her being weak and frail honoured the person she was throughout her life.

“See, this is how I’d like you to remember Babcia Ewa,” I said, even as I realized that the word ‘remember’ wasn’t quite right. After all, they’d never known her, their memories were my memories, my stories. 

After looking at the albums for a while, the kids ran off to play. I stayed on the couch, looking out the window, the picture I had removed still laying face down beside me. I put my hand on it but didn’t flip it over. ‘I don’t want to put this back, I don’t want to see this again,’ I thought. I have a photographic memory, quite a good one, and sometimes at random it recalls images, even moments, like movie scenes. I knew if I looked at that picture for too long it would get imprinted on my memory. It is both a gift and a curse, to remember so much. Sometimes, I can walk back in time and sit amongst those I love who are already gone, but at other times, my mind takes me unwillingly into painful memories, often when I least expect it. In the balance of things, however, I wouldn’t change it. 

But that image, and a few others of the last days of her life, I didn’t want to keep. I wanted to let them go, but I didn’t know how. Literally, I didn’t know how to remove them from my possession. For twenty years I had been carrying them with me, from house to house, from box to box. And with so little to remember her by, the thought of letting go of anything that contained her, hurt. Even though I knew those pictures didn’t tell the story of her life, they documented her departure, they were impossible to release. She was not defined by her illness or her early death, she was not her frailty, her colourless skin, the agony which contorted her body, her lifeless eyes, she was everything that had come before that final chapter – so why couldn’t I let them go?

A few years before she died, when she got sick the first time, my mother undertook a project of making each of her children, five of us, an album of our own. I’ve wondered if there was some part of her that knew she could not take the future for granted any longer. I say that because the photo album project was one of several she started around the same time, close to the age of forty. She was creating memory chests for us, trying to pour as much of herself as she could into her letters, into organizing our existence, into planning for our future, the one without her. 

Looking through my siblings albums, I’ve seen some pictures repeated, those of our grandparents and our early lives in Poland, Germany, and Canada. But what made each album a bit different was the prominence of one person, each of us, like the main character of that story. Photos were often inscribed on the back with names, places, dates. My mother printed rolls of film in sets of five and meticulously organized them in each album. She had managed to almost fill each one but then she stopped. I could tell where her work ended and that of my aunt, her older sister, began. The photographs no longer had my mother’s handwriting on the back of them, the photographer was also clearly different. The pictures were no longer of our ordinary lives, now they were images of the kids by the hospital bed, the kids alone at home, the kids in hospital again, the kids…  

My aunt had come from Poland for the last six months of my mother’s life and cared for her until the last moment. On my mother’s request, I am certain, she kept printing pictures and moving the albums forward in history, all the way to the last few days of her life, all the way to the moment her body was surrounded by roses at the alter, with her children standing behind her. 

When I left home a few months after my mother died I took my album with me. 

It is still with me today, but I’ve changed the timeline and I’ve erased a chapter. From my album I removed the pictures of my dying mother. I didn’t need those photographs to remember that summer and fall, the memories will remain forever.

In my culture you can not throw away a sacred item; images of my mother were and are sacred to me. I couldn’t just discard them, but I didn’t want to be haunted by them anymore, and I didn’t want my children to see them. It was not the way I wanted to remember her. Her sickness was a small part of the story of her life, and once her spirit was gone, the lifeless vessel that held her was free. She wasn’t there anymore. Those final moments weren’t meant to be immortalized. 

That day on the couch, after the kids left to play, with the picture in my hand, I asked my late grandmother for help; what was I to do? 

‘If you must discard something sacred, return it to the earth,’ she had once told me.

I walked outside, gathered wood, and built a fire. One by one, I held each picture of my mother, when she was already very sick and in hospital, I kissed it, said goodbye, and laid it on the flames. 

Ashes to ashes.

We are not the worst moment of our life, we are not the best either. We are the ordinary moments rarely witnessed by others. We are the spirit that takes up home within our time-bound vessel. My mother’s spirit was one of love, that is how I remember her. In the red beret, she is holding my youngest brother at his christening, enraptured. She looked at each of us like that, as though we were the only thing that mattered. Here, she is blowing out the candles on her forty-third birthday, with that same baby boy clinging to her side. A few months after that picture was taken cancer returned. She celebrated her forty-forth birthday in between rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, by that point, no longer fighting to live, just trying to get a little more time. 

My mother love unguarded and without limit. 

She filled me with a lifetime of love in a mere sixteen years. 

This is how I remember her.