On our relationship with death
We all die and yet death is something that always take us by surprise. We never seem to be ready to deal with someone’s death perhaps because, being sort of a taboo topic, we hardly ever talk about it. But, why is it so? This is a question that keeps going around my mind once and again since as a teenager a waited for months around a hospital room for my father to die.
To analyse and try to understand this life/death issue, I have a project in mind that would take me to spend quite a bit of time in the surroundings of that first encounter with death. The question is: am I ready for it? I guess the honest answer would be… no, no yet. But I do feel that life, from to time, throws me into situations that slowly walk me into the frame of mind required for such, still disturbing, subject matter.
For the last few years, every November 1st, I’ve gone to the cemeteries to take photos of people visiting their relative’s graves, on that day, specially decorated for the catholic celebration of All Saints. It’s always been hard to approach people in this deep sorrow mood. I guess, in this corner of the world, we have assumed that taking photos around death ceremonies is not all that well seen. But this is something that doesn’t happen in every culture as I unexpectedly found out last September in Nicaragua.
One day, while wandering around the streets of the colonial city of Granada, I bumped into a funeral procession. As it looked pretty peculiar to me, I thought it would be interesting to take some pictures. So I decided to follow the procession up to the cemetery. Concerned about how my presence there would be understood, I politely asked it was ok for me to be around with the camera. To my surprise, they said that “not only was ok but an honour”. Still trying to digest this ’honour’ idea which was so different to what I would had expected in my culture, I realised that I was not the only one with a camera in hands. The funeral was being recorded on video and also, people were approaching the coffin, not only to say good bye but to take one last picture of the dead with their mobile phones. That vision shocked me at first and then immediately took me back to my long-standing question: why do us people in this part of the world, have such a harsh relationship with death?
While I keep looking for answers, here are a couple of images of a beautiful farewell to a love one.
I’ve just realised that, perhaps because of my own harsh relationship with death, I have censured my edit. I do have photos of the dead being photographed but, my sense of respect tells me that there is no need to show them. But, why? Somehow, I now feel that my sense of respect would not agree at all with their idea about the meaning of those photos.