8 hours ago
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I remember the moment this photo was taken: five years ago, on my partner Claire’s birthday, in a National Trust for Scotland garden six miles east of Edinburgh. We were standing on a wooden deck, an ideal spot for pond-dipping with the kids and a lesser-known viewing platform for trainspotters. This is where my autistic son, then six, loved (and still loves) to jump in tandem with the ScotRail trains toggling back and forth in the middle distance. We had just eaten a small, hasty birthday picnic of pastries and Nosecco. We wandered down through the walled garden to the wild meadow encircling a pond. We ended up where we always end up. On our deck.
Somehow I knew it was a moment worth freezing in time. I gave our dear friend Dawn – whose husband had recently died and who was slowly, informally becoming part of our family – my phone. She took two photos. In the first, two of the five subjects – dog and son – are showing their rear ends to the lens. In the second – this one – almost all of us are looking directly at the lens. Some of us even look happy. Result!
I love this photo for its rarity: our son’s needs require us to mostly parent our kids separately, which has many consequences, one of them being that we have painfully few photos of us together as a family. I love mine and Claire’s true smiles. I love that Claire is wearing her Judith Butler “Gender Trouble” T-shirt and I’m in my red Saltwater sandals, which I still wear every summer. I love the slightly suspicious expression drawn on my daughter’s glorious two-year-old face and, like all nosy mothers, am irritated that I can’t recall what’s in the brown paper bag. I love that Daphne, our greying rescue staffie and the great dog-love of my life, has adopted her customary scared/stoical position known in our family as “jug-tail”. I love that we are in a place that possesses the one quality that means everything to parents of autistic children: namely (aside from the almighty din we make), it’s quiet. Entire hours can pass in this garden without sight of another mortal – there have been days when we have seen more kingfishers (two!) than people. There is no judgment here. We are free to be the family we are elsewhere rarely seen as being. No wonder this photo makes me cry.
But there is more. Three months before it was taken, my mother died of breast cancer at the height of the pandemic, alone, in a London hospice 500 impassable miles from my home in Leith. This is a photo of a newly motherless daughter and a grief-stricken mum holding it together for her partner’s birthday under the latest set of lockdown restrictions. It is also a photo of a family that no longer exists in its original iteration. Four years later, in another sorrowful autumn, my beloved Daphne died.
I’ve become obsessed with photos like this one, lodged between the aftermath of grief and the beforemath of future losses, worrying at the present. Photos in which you appear to be coping, happy even, while beneath the surface a more raw, urgent, and only partially-understood life is unfolding. To me, this image is a survival manifesto. It is a photo of a happy family. It is a photo saturated in grief.
