The Man in the Photograph
On my office shelf, a photograph of my father stands watch—silent, unchanging, and, in a way, unknowable. In it, he carries wood planks over his shoulder, his grin a fragment of unselfconscious joy. Behind him, the ski chalet he restored stands like a monument to competence and optimism. It’s the sort of picture that captures a person not as they were in their totality but as they might wish to be remembered—a distillation, free of the messier truths of illness, fatigue, or the gradual erosion of character that time so often imposes.
It has been twelve years since his death, long enough for the sharp edges of grief to blunt into something far more ambiguous. The photograph hangs there, but it no longer tugs at me the way it did in those first years when his absence was still a raw, open wound. This is what nobody tells you about grief: eventually, it stops. Not with the dramatic finality of an extinguished flame, but like a tide pulling back so slowly you don’t realize it’s gone until you’re standing on dry sand. And with that cessation comes its own peculiar guilt.
I am haunted less by his absence than by the knowledge that I have grown comfortable with it. Days pass, sometimes weeks, without him crossing my mind. It is not that I have forgotten him entirely—how could I, when I see fragments of him in my own reflection, in the way my hands mimic his when I tinker with something, or in the patterns of speech I’ve unknowingly inherited? But I have let the image of him, the essence of who he was, fade. And I wonder if that, too, is a betrayal.
What lingers most vividly are not his best years but his last—the slow decline, the hospice bed, the quiet indignities we both pretended not to notice. It is as though the memory of his vitality has been crowded out by those final months, eclipsed by the peculiar gravity of mortality. I wonder if this is the curse of the human mind, that it anchors itself in endings rather than beginnings, in decline rather than ascent. My children, born years after his death, will never know even the faintest outlines of the man he was, only the scraps I choose to tell them—and what kind of portrait is that? An heirloom, perhaps, but a fractured one, incomplete and inevitably skewed by my own failings as a storyteller.
Sometimes, I envy them their blank slate. They will not have to reconcile the man in the photograph with the man who faltered at the end, the man who was so thoroughly himself until he wasn’t. They will never have to wrestle with the slow erosion of memory, with the gnawing realization that what remains of him in my mind is increasingly curated, a selective archive where the joyful moments are preserved but not entirely authentic. I envy them because they will never carry the burden of forgetting, though it is a burden I feel I must bear.
Yet, the question persists: What does it mean to stop grieving? Is it a failure of love or merely the inevitable adaptation to loss? When I hold my own children, I feel the same love that I know he felt for me, and it strikes me that perhaps this is the answer. The dead do not need us to remember them in every moment; it is enough that we continue the work they began, shaping the lives of those who follow. My children, who will never know the man in the photograph, will know him through me, in ways so subtle they may not even notice. His humor, his determination, his restless curiosity—they live on, refracted through me and into them.
And yet, the guilt remains, lurking quietly, as guilt often does. Not because I loved him too little but because I feel, irrationally, that I should have loved him better—more consciously, more persistently, as if love could be measured by its constancy. But love, like memory, is not a static thing. It ebbs and flows, fading and returning in ways that are as unpredictable as they are human. The photograph remains on the shelf, watching, waiting, its unchanging presence a quiet reminder that grief, too, is not an endpoint but a passage.