Gram's Dress, A Goodbye Story
Composting loss and grief one photograph at a time
Hello Friends and a big welcome to all New Subscribers!
Last week’s piece, Dwelling in Loss & Light, drew more attention than any previous post, except for the one I wrote last fall about composting in New York City.
Thank you for your continuing interest!
Within the context of the ‘Between Bodies’ theme I mentioned last week, I’m paying particular attention to questions around loss and grief.1
It’s hard to know where to begin. In the past fifteen years, I’ve lost people I love, grieve for parts of myself I once held sacred, and struggle with an ongoing anticipatory loss around climate change.
Then there’s just the reality of getting older, with children leaving home and transitions into a different stage in life.
While preparing for the upcoming “Practice Group” I’m facilitating within Kinship, I started thinking about strategies I’ve used to cope with loss and grief. Over and over, it seems, my camera has been my companion and objects of all kinds my muses.2
In 2015, six years after my grandmother died, I was finally ready to process her loss and to pay attention to some of her objects stored in our attic, including this dress.
While not the pink gown in which she sat for her portrait around the same time, this one has the same soft hues and delicacy. Was this what Gram wore during her ‘Debut’ in Chicago in 1928?
For almost two hours, this silk and lace gown and I danced in the late afternoon light.
We laughed about this dress, once worn in a ballroom in Chicago, now out and about in a garden in New Hampshire.
Like her, I love to dance…and when I dance, I’m a terrible flirt. As we twirled, palpable energy flowed between us and I wondered which sons of the Chicago ‘royalty’ were on her dance card as she Fox Trotted and Waltzed into the night, seducing one desirable after another.
For a brief moment, Gram was actually there with me.3
When we returned to the terrace, it occurred to me that the delicacy of this lace is deceivingly sweet…Gram had power. She knew how to get what she wanted.
The tangled mass around the hem cast elegant shadows and where attached to the bodice, the curves were ocean waves, held together by strong thread.
To me, Gram was like that thread - - connected, stable, taking whatever chaos and energy there might be in a moment and calming it, bringing it to shore.
Seeing the silk, lace and organza sway, I remembered the last time I saw her, just two weeks before she died.
She was very still, wearing a delicate pink floral night gown also edged with lace.
Why did she save this particular gown, and not the one from her portrait?
Maybe it was because she wore that dress while sitting still with some aging oil painter whereas this was a dress in which she came alive.
The light shifts and the gown and I chasséd to another part of the terrace.
I can only imagine Gram with her hair in a bob, pearls and a diamond or two doing the Charleston.
“She’s a catch” the mother’s would have said.
And she was. Only instead of marrying one of those gloriously eligible men from Chicago’s North Shore, she married my grandfather, who, while a Harvard man, was also the son of a doctor from Hartford, CT - - definitely not from the midwestern industrial elite.
Marrying Grandfather was her first great rebellion. Her second was marrying my step-grandfather in 1983 after my grandfather died. Gram and O almost made it to their 25th wedding anniversary.
Gram died in 2009, just shy of 98. I think most of us were relieved. Those last few years had been lonely, and Gram liked a good party.
Our lives have many acts and I wonder why the final act, that one when we say good-bye, is so hard?
If we are lucky, we have decades to prepare for it. But we don’t.
The wind shifts. Gram continues to dance.
I look at these images now and wish I’d spent more time with her during those final few years and asked her about her ‘debut’ and other big moments. Granted, I had two young children at home and my mother was going through more chemotherapy, but still.
The reality was that when we were together, she wanted to know about me and what was going on in my life, and that felt good.
I continue to zoom in and out, click the camera and play with the light. Then I remember that this isn’t Gram. This is just a glorious gown she once wore and onto which I have imposed an entire narrative.
A necessary narrative at this particular time - - both a decade ago when I created these images and now, when I compile them into this post.
I remember how sad I felt when I first took the grown out of the box. But as objects and light will do to a photographer, I became intensely curious about both the structure of the object itself and the life it might have contained. Gram had become the subject, but in an objective sort of way.
Intimacy and objectivity are odd playmates.
I also remember how by the end of our ‘photo shoot,’ there was a deep longing to have known this version of my grandmother, to have been part of her circle of friends.
When Gram died, her granddaughters and a number of nieces claimed to have been particularly special to Gram, citing one moment or another when she showed them a ‘different’ kind of relationship than she had with anyone else.
I’m curious about that, because I think that in reality, she shared her power with everyone equally. That was, in fact, one of her greatest gifts - - calm equanimity.
When the light had faded and our time together was over, I packaged up the dress and sent it to my cousin who inherited the enormous oil portrait of Gram. I have no idea what she did with the dress, but it doesn’t really matter.
Gram and I shared our intimate moment. Now it was time for my grandmother to share her energy with someone else and time for me to not ‘move on,’ but to fully ‘live in’ the spirit of this person whose blood runs through my veins.
Going back and forth in time while compiling this narrative allowed me to essentially transcend time and Gram’s and my physical bodies, placing us both in a larger continuum of being. Such a magical experience.
Perhaps in the coming days, weeks or years you might consider spending time with something that belonged to someone you love, but who is now gone.
Take the object for a walk or have tea together. And if you’re feeling adventurous, take some portraits of it along the way.
Please tell me about your experience in the Comments section below. Just click this button. If you hit reply to this e-mail, I’m afraid I’ll never hear about your experience.
As always, thank you for sharing this space and your time with me.
With cheers and gratitude for you being you,
Lyn
If Gram’s Dress, A Goodbye Story inspired you, please consider sharing it with friends and family. Loss and grief are such huge topics. I’ll be sharing more on this in the weeks to come.
Within the Kinship Photography Collectives exploration of the Between Bodies theme in 2024, I am facilitating a 6 week “Practice Group” called Reimagining Loss & Grief. It’s full, but if it goes well, I hope to offer this or a similar kind of workshop/practice group again in the future. Stay tuned! The two primary questions we’re considering, among others, are:
Is there, in fact, a visual language for loss and grief?
Can photography allow me to capture what is already lost or prepare me for future losses?
I call this essay a ‘goodbye story’ because that’s what this is, an ode to a person and an object that are no longer physically present in my life. Over the years I have documented many such stories, some of which I will share here in the coming weeks.
While I didn’t know there was such a thing as a ‘grief ritual,’ I seem to have created one for myself and am excited to share the experiences with you.
Gram was not a warm, fuzzy cuddly kind of person. There were rules of engagement, as it were, but she had this way of wrinkling her nose and smiling with her eyes at rare moments of a shared laugh. We had a lot of these during the first few years she figured out how to be part of her second husband’s family. It was sweet. We were somehow in it together.
I’m here from your sister’s blog, enjoying what I’ve read.
My Gram was a powerful influence. Until I left for college, I saw her most every day of my life. I don’t have any of her clothes to dance with but I have photos that I have contemplated for a long time. She, too, was quite fashionable, fashion conscious. The puzzle is, how that came to be. Born into a very poor immigrant family, her clothes were always homemade. A young widow with a newborn daughter, on her own just after the Great Depression, she barely had money to keep food on the table, and no family to help her. Yet, the photos prove she wore the latest fashions, undoubtedly sewn by herself. She took in sewing for others; did she make her own dresses, even pants!, from the scraps?
Anyway, we are both fortunate to have had Grams in our lives! Be well.