The Photograph Nobody Can Name

Everyone with an old family has the box. It comes to you eventually — a shoebox, a tin, a swollen envelope — full of photographs, and you sit down with it some afternoon meaning to sort it, and you get a little way in and you stop, because you have arrived at the faces nobody can name.

Here is a woman in a good dress, standing very straight against a painted backdrop, looking directly at you across a hundred years. Here are three children on a step, squinting. Here is a young man in a uniform, half-smiling, holding his cap. And you turn them over hoping for writing on the back, and sometimes there is a name and a date in a hand you don’t recognize, and more often there is nothing, or worse, a single first name — Ada — that explains nothing, connects to no one, and only sharpens the loss. Because these were people. They were loved; someone stood them against the backdrop and paid for the photograph and kept it carefully for decades precisely so they would not be forgotten. And they have been forgotten. You are holding the proof of a life and you cannot say whose, and the one person who could have told you — your grandmother, who knew every face in the box, who would have said oh, that’s Ada, your great-great-aunt, the one who — is gone, and took the names with her, and now Ada is just a straight-backed woman in a good dress, looking at a stranger, unnamed.

The second death

There is an idea, an old one, that we die twice: once when the body goes, and again, later, the final time, when the last person who remembers us forgets, or dies. The box is where you watch the second death happen. Not as an abstraction — as an object, in your hands, on an ordinary afternoon. The straight-backed woman had her first death a century ago. Her second death happened more recently and more quietly, in a specific moment that nobody marked: the moment your grandmother died, and the name detached from the face, and Ada slipped from being a remembered person into being an anonymous image, which is a kind of death that photography was supposed to prevent and instead, cruelly, documents. The picture kept her face and lost her, which is almost worse than losing both, because now there is a face with no one home, a preserved absence, a person reduced to the fact that they once, briefly, were.

And the thing that gets me, sitting with the box, is not sadness for the strangers exactly. It is the slow cold arrival of a recognition that has nothing abstract about it, because it is looking right at me: this is what happens to everyone. This is what happens to me.

The face in the box is you

Because you are, right now, in someone’s future box. The photographs of you — the good one from the wedding, the awkward one from the office, the candid one where you were laughing at something now forgotten — are going to end up, in fifty or eighty years, in a tin, in the hands of someone not yet born, who will turn them over looking for a name, and find none, or find a first name that means nothing to them, and they will hold your face, your actual face, the one you are wearing right now as you read this, and they will not know who you were, and they will feel a mild pang, and they will put you in the pile of the unnamed, and move on. The person who could have told them — your child, your grandchild, the one who knew you — will by then be gone, or old, and the name will have detached from your face, and you will have had your second death, in a tin, on an afternoon, in the hands of a stranger who is looking for a place to sort you and settles, at last, on don’t know.

I do not find this as bleak as it sounds, and I want to be careful here, because the easy move is to turn it into a lesson — so label your photographs, so ask the names now — and that is good advice, and you should, and I am not going to make the whole essay about the advice, because the advice is not the true thing. The true thing is quieter and stranger, and it is a kind of peace that comes only after the pang, when you sit long enough with the box.

The company of the unnamed

Because the straight-backed woman is not, in fact, entirely lost. She is here, in my hands, looking at me, and I am looking back, and for this moment, on this afternoon, a stranger a century later is holding her face and wondering about her — who she was, whether she was kind, what the half-smile of the young man beside her was about, what became of the three squinting children on the step. I cannot name her. But I can look at her, and wonder, and feel, for the length of an afternoon, something like company across the enormous distance, and there is a version of remembrance in that which does not require a name at all. She has outlived everyone who knew her, and she has come to rest, for now, in the attention of a stranger who finds her worth pausing over, and that is not nothing. It is, in fact, roughly what any of us can hope for, in the long run: not to be remembered, precisely — almost no one is, past a few generations — but to be, now and then, looked at, and wondered about, by someone who understands, holding the box, that the unnamed faces were people, and were loved, and are owed at least the small dignity of a stranger’s pause.

So I do not always sort the box. Sometimes I just sit with it, with Ada and the young man and the squinting children, the whole quiet crowd of the forgotten who are not quite gone as long as someone is holding them, and I let myself be, for an afternoon, the last thin thread of their remembrance — not their rememberer, I cannot be that, I don’t know their names — but their witness, the stranger who paused, which is what I will need someone to be for me, one day, in a tin, when the name has come off my face at last and all that’s left is a person in a good shirt, looking out, hoping to be wondered about.