memento mori

“This is a dance with death; we are communicating with spirits.”

In her recent book, The Fear, Christiana Spens writes that photography is, at its base level, “simply a way of communicating – not only with the spectres of the past, but with the very alive and present people whose attention we wish to engage.”

In the weeks that followed Spencer’s passing I would often blurt out what had happened, throwing it into the conversation before the foundations had been properly laid to take such a heavy burden. This was always met with kindness but nonetheless it made me feel, awkward. People understandably did not know what to say, there is after all, little that can be said. But nonetheless I had to get it off my chest, simply because in the immediate aftermath, the space opened by    trauma   I could not engage with others without them knowing. I had to contextualise myself. It is not as if the conversation would thereby proceed any differently from this point forward, had I not sliced my heart and let it spill onto the table. In fact, people probably made a concerted effort to be aggressively normal. Yet they knew, and I knew that then knew and this was enough.

The black arm band has long since been a signifier of grief and of remembrance. It is remembrance though that the black band is most often used to represent. My mum has always said that the bereaved should wear, if they want, black arm bands to remind others of their grief and of the altered state of being that a significant loss drags one into.

“How better to communicate the raw emotion of grief”, Spens continues, “than to show another person a picture of one departed, with the simple context that you loved them?”

At some point I found an old passport photo of Spence in a draw. He looks gorgeous, with his slightly wet, curly hair and eyes that seem to hold the entire universe within them. I considered putting the photo inside my phone case but decided against it, not wanting the lingering eyes which then lead, or so I thought, to sympathetic glances. However, after a blue wave I realised that I wanted people to be reminded. Not that I was struggling, because for the most part I am fine (as terribly cliché as this sounds), but merely that I love him, and he is no longer here.

For the last two years I have worked at Crofters, a holiday and after-school club for children with special needs that Spencer used to attend. Below are photographs for his time there that are in a series of photo-books that are often out at work. I first saw them in April 2021, not long after I had started working, back when he was still alive.