Death and Birth
Last week in my post I was talking about my resistance to getting down to the darkroom and knowing that once there in the flow I would wonder what had taken me so long. Well, I was right about that, although it did take me an extra day to begin printing. I was taking my time, cleaning the print washer, mixing chemistry, some new hypo clearing agent for washing the prints and more selenium toning solution. That doesn’t really take very long but I did manage to procrastinate for quite some time waiting for my water to come to precisely the right temperature for mixing the hypo clear....I had it too warm then had to cool it down. Excuses, excuses.
While waiting, but out of earshot of the phone, I had a call from a close friend, who left me a message saying her mother was in hospital, had taken a turn for the worse and was now nearing the end and removed from any life supporting measures. Although she had had a number of ailments for some time, this sudden deterioration in her condition was a sad surprise. So part of my delay on the day I last wrote was in waiting for a reply to my reply to that missed phone call as I was anxious to comfort my dear friend. As it turned out, her mother passed away three days later and we will be attending the funeral this week.
While I had met my friend’s mother on a number of occasions I did not know her well but for stories of her love for things pretty and pink, very much a genteel lady. This is no doubt a very difficult time for my friend as she is an only child and this is her first parent to pass. Her mother’s last few days in the hospital brought to mind my own’s parents’ deaths some years ago, two years apart, first my mom then dad, each one in the hospital for a few days at the end. They were difficult deaths, not the tv kind where everyone gathers around, has some nice sentimental words to share, good-byes are said and hands held as they pass. The death of a parent, whatever your feelings and relationship with that parent, seems a complex emotional process, not just them leaving your life but the things said or left unsaid, the manner of how they pass and the state they are in at the end. It can be very painful to witness.
It is also the first anniversary, give or take a few days, of the death of one of my brothers, so this week’s funeral will be only a day or so from the anniversary of his funeral. His ashes sit on my windowsill with a view of the garden, awaiting this summer when my other brothers have assured me they will come to Nova Scotia to witness his burial next to our parents. I brought him home with me from Montreal last January 26th.
And yet in this frigid January weather, today well below our South Shore normal for this date, with a minus 25C windchill and drifting snow, there is still hope of new life, creation and springtime. When I finally made it to the darkroom to print last Friday I rediscovered that, once in the flow after remembering how to work the 40 year-old Beseler enlarger, a darkroom can be quite womb-like and comforting. It is small (or at least, mine is), warm, dark, humid and lit only by a red safelight while developing. And at the end of the process you are giving birth to your creativity, bearing new images out of the liquids. Certainly for me, being childless, my acts of creation in the darkroom or the garden are my way of giving birth to something that originates within then emerges in the outside world for all to see.
And then to inspire more hope for new life to come, we were surprised this morning to see a pair of handsome red foxes, trotting across the field behind the house in the breaking dawn’s glow. One of them was actually black (but which I learned through the internet was still a red fox although colloquially called a silver fox....go figure), and it was likely this pair were in breeding mode as their time is between late December and mid-March. We can surmise that somewhere in the surrounding 4 to 8 square kilometers there is likely a den being established for potential pups to be born in the spring.
So the symbols and signs of new birth, new creations and the reminders of the universe’s regenerative nature can appear to us in sometimes surprising places and serendipitously at times when one most needs the hope that the cycle of life does indeed continue. I give thanks for that today.
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