Last week, we suddenly found ourselves en route to Alabama, due to the death of Steve's Grandma Sara. She passed away the day after her 85th birthday. A faithful member (and former choir director) of the First Baptist Church in Hamilton, Alabama, she'd been active almost up to the very end. The day she fell and broke her hip a few weeks back, she'd been at the local public access TV station, taping her weekly Christian muppet show (she had big round-headed muppets, like Ernie on Sesame Street). She'd developed the shows as a missionary in Malawi and Australia.
Grandma Sara never really recovered from the fall that broke her hip, and she had a massive stroke while Steve and I were in Ireland. We returned home to the news that Grandma Sara didn't have much time left. We flew down into Birmingham last Saturday, rented a pickup truck and drove the 100 miles to Hamilton.
Stories to come, tomorrow and Wednesday. I apologize in advance for the photo quality; I didn't bring the camera for fear it would be seen as morbid, so the photos were all taken with my cell phone.
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2 comments:
I actually did a big project in college on death photography. It was for a religion class called "Death and the Macabre." I took that class expressly for its title, but I also learned that in the 1880s corpse portraits were all the rage. They would even prop people up in rocking chairs by the fire place, or right up against the wall in their coffins. I suppose when you look at photography for recording or history, it's not so macabre after all.
Steve's family actually HAS old corpse photos at their ancestral home in Mississippi. At first we thought the old photos were just of people sleeping. Then we figured it out.
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