Barbara's blog: The End Is Where We Start

Barabara rediscovers her parents through an old photograph.

My favourite photo of mum and dad is a small, black and white snapshot that I found when I was going through mum’s possessions in her apartment, after she died. The image sat in a delicate, ornate silver frame, on her dressing table, among the piles of books, reading glasses and church pamphlets that were cluttering the space. I don’t know exactly who took the photo or how it came into my parents’ possession. I have a vague memory of mum telling me that she and dad had gone to Genoa for the afternoon, maybe at a medical appointment, and they had been snapped by a street photographer. But the mystery that surrounds the origin of the photograph, only adds to its allure.

In the photo, mum and dad are holding hands. Dad is wearing a smart suit with a tie, as was the fashion in the seventies, his gaze turned slightly to the side, as though casually acknowledging the photographer. Mum looks relaxed but she is neither smiling nor looking at the camera. She is wearing an open collar blouse and matching jacket and skirt, cut above the knee, and loafers. Her blond hair falls softly to her shoulders. The photo perfectly captures them both mid-step, a young couple striding towards their future, their hopes and dreams still nascent and unspoken.

Last April I travelled to my hometown in Italy with the family, to visit relatives. We took a trip to the cemetery, as I had tasked a stonemason to affix a small bunch of ceramic flowers to the loculus that holds my parents’ ashes, and I wanted to check the work had been completed. The cemetery lies on the edge of town, in a quiet, leafy enclave. We followed a narrow path through rows of graves until we reached the ‘ara crematoria’, where the ashes of those who opt to be cremated are kept, in individual recessed compartments sealed with a named headstone. As we entered, it was cool, shady and deafly silent. I remembered coming here as a child with mum to bring flowers to dad, a task I didn’t particularly enjoy, and the muscle memory took me to the wall where my parents’ loculus was, as it had always been mum’s wish for her ashes to join dad’s, finally together after a lifetime.

As I lifted my eyes to inspect the work of the stonemason, I noticed a photograph set into the headstone, nestled between my parents’ names and dates of birth and death. It was the same photo I had found on mum’s dressing table. It was such a bizarre moment it took my breath away. How had it come to be there? The only plausible explanation was that when making the arrangements for the loculus, mum had included a copy of that photograph in her instructions to the cemetery. But why that one? Why not a wedding portrait or a picture from their beloved holidays in London? Why choose a fleeting snapshot in which neither of them looks at the camera? It feels incongruous, and yet, in its quiet defiance, it captures mum perfectly: traditional and loyal, but also, in her own way, resolutely unconventional.

Since mum died I have been on a journey of discovery. In the objects she left behind and the fragments of stories she shared, I have glimpsed something of the love she and Dad held for each other, which burnt brightly for years after dad passed. I understood why mum was always so stern and proud, not wanting to show weakness or be pitied. I put her life together piece by piece, which helped me soften the opinion I had of her. However, there was one more surprise.

When we got home from Italy, I went into the loft to put away the suitcases. Half hidden behind a crate, there was a small box of things I had brought back from mum’s house after she died. Inside it, you have probably already guessed it, was another copy of the same photograph. I still don’t know exactly where it was taken. But it feels as though it has all come full circle, settling the mystery into something gentler, something I can live with. And, in a way, the photograph has brought my parents back to me, if only as an image, suspended in time. Because the end, is often where we start from. (T.S. Eliot)

Barbara works as an environmental strategist for the aviation regulator and lives a stone’s throw from the South Downs, with her 20-year-old creative daughter, 19-year-old ingenious son and supportive husband.