dnr

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My brother died this morning. He was pronounced dead at 2:20 a.m. It was exactly a year and a day after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

It’s been a long, strange 366 days. I’ve taken several photographs of him in that time. Photos taken during mushroom hunts, photos shot while taking walks, photos of him in his garage. Many of those photos are sitting quietly on my computer, where they’ll probably remain for a while. Eventually I’ll delete most of them. They’re just photographs.

But every day of this last month I brought my camera with me to the hospice. Most days it stayed in the bag. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph him with the naso-gastric tube; it made him look so frail. He wouldn’t want to be seen that way. Three or four times I pulled the camera out of the bag with the intent of photographing his hands, and each time I put the camera back without taking the lens cap off. Except this one frame, shot three days ago when the sun filtered in softly and he seemed calm and quiet and comfortable. One frame is all I could manage—one shaky frame, and it sort of creeps me out that I shot it.

It’s not a good photograph, and ordinarily I’d hit the delete button. But I told myself it was the last photo ever taken of my brother. As I write this, though, it seems to me that this really isn’t a photograph of my brother at all. Not really. This is just a photo of the failing container that held him.

(I’ve deleted four earlier drafts of this. I felt the need to say something about my brother, but each of the earlier drafts turned into a soppy eulogy. He’d have hated that. He’d prefer, I think, to see something in which I’ve creeped myself out. That would have made him laugh.)

in which i give a critique disguised as discourse

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Over the last couple of years I’ve been slowly banging away at a series of photos centering on traffic signals. A few months ago an acquaintance told me he liked the series and wanted to know if I’d object if he started a similar series.

How could I object? I don’t own traffic signals. So I told him to have at it. Recently he asked me to look at his series and give my thoughts. As a general rule, that’s my cue to run and hide and avoid that person for a few weeks. I tried to distract him with an amusing anecdote about an Irishman, a Jew and a Martian who walked into a bar, but he wasn’t having any of it. So I looked at the photos. I mean, how bad could it be?

Pretty fucking bad, is how bad. He’d jammed about 70 or 80 photos together, of which maybe half a dozen were good (in my opinion, which is a matter of taste, of course). But it wasn’t just a matter of good/bad photographs; he didn’t seem to understand that a series needs to work as a unit, not just as individual images. He didn’t know how to edit them so they worked together.

So I found myself thinking about what makes a series work, and here’s what I think: what makes a series work is its ability to communicate an idea or a mood. It’s not just a collection of photographs of the same thing–coffee cups, the dog, decaying houses, sports equipment, traffic signals. A successful series, I think, finds meaning in the subject, or brings meaning to the subject, or explores relationships between the subject and other stuff, or conveys a specific unifying mood. But it’s not just photos that feature the same thing.

And that’s where this guy failed, in my opinion. They were just random pictures of random traffic signals shot for no other reason than there was a traffic signal in the frame, then clumped together without any editorial thought. If this guy (who, I hope, will be reading this) would only decide why he’s shooting the photos of traffic signals, then cull the images that don’t fit with his intent, he’d have a good beginning for a series.

stubborn

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I don’t normally like to photograph kids after they reach the age where they’re aware of the camera and what it does. They tend to respond too much to the camera. Too much or too little.

This is a fairly controlled smile. This is the face she was determined to present to the camera, and nothing I could do or say could crack that control. She’s a smart kid, stubborn as can be. But she wasn’t being stubborn out of mule-headed intransigence. She was being stubborn because it amused her. She made stubborn seem charming.

thorn

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You learn something new every day. Today I learned about this: þ. This is the letter ‘thorn,’ which I didn’t even know was a letter. And in a way, it’s not–at least not in modern English. It was used in Old English, Old Norse and is apparently still in use in the Icelandic alphabet. It’s pronounced like the digraph ‘th’ (as in either ‘theory’ or ‘then’).

Now, why is this cool? I’ll tell you why. Because over time þ began to be written as Ƿ, which eventually became indistinguishable from the letter ‘Y’.

Okay, it’s still not clear why that’s cool, is it. It becomes more clear when you see the letter thorn in use. As in ‘Ƿe Olde Pickle Shoppe.’ Which is now generally written as ‘Ye Olde Pickle Shoppe.’ And which is always pronounced ‘Yee’ when it should, in fact, be pronounced ‘The’.

All right, then–maybe it’s not all that cool. But hey, I learned something new.

the moon, the fence, and the dog’s bladder

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So it’s just after midnight, right? And the brother’s little dog demands to be let outside to pee (how such a small dog can contain such an astonishing quantity of urine is a mystery to me; I think about a third of its body weight must be urine). But it’s a beauteous evening, as Wordsworth would have it–calm and free and all that. So I wander outside as well.

The moon is absurdly bright, and it’s illuminating the fence in a particularly charming way. So I go fetch my gear to photograph it. Camera goes on the tripod, tripod legs are extended, camera settings are adjusted, lens cap is removed, remote shutter release is ready. Then everything went pear-shaped, as the Brits would say.

In order to get the composition I wanted, I had to set up the tripod in front of the brother’s garage. But when you move in front of the garage, a motion sensor turns on a light. Of course, the light turns itself off after a few minutes, which would have allowed me to shoot the photograph IF I stood very still. Which I didn’t do three times in a row.

But the marvelous thing about a remote shutter release is you can stand off to one side and trigger it. So all I had to do was set up the shot, move out of range of the motion detector, wait for the light to go out, then press the remote release. It would have worked like a charm but for the little urine-filled dog, who repeatedly wandered into sensor range.

So I had to corral the wee beastie and put it in the house. By which time the moon had gone behind the clouds, leaving me with nothing whatsoever to photograph. Except the model of greatest convenience.

So here’s me, sulking.

chores

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I need to mow the brother’s lawn.

Despite not taking any nourishment or liquids for the last three or four days, despite blood still being suctioned from his stomach, Jesse Eugene’s body continues to remain alive. We keep thinking that this must be his last day–and yet each day his body carries on.

The world doesn’t stop, of course, just because my brother is very slowly dying. It doesn’t even slow down. And yet all the little mundane chores and errands that take up so much time every week seem weirdly out of place. Yesterday I went with my oldest brother, Roger Lee, to replenish his supply of his favorite tea. We had to visit three or four shops before we could find one that carried the tea. At one point we were near a big box sporting goods store, so we stopped and went in. We looked at kayaks, we looked at golf equipment–and for a short time we stopped thinking about Jesse Eugene slowly dying in the hospice.

So this morning, instead of heading off to the hospice, I’ll be cranking up the brother’s aging lawn mower and making his lawn presentable to the neighbors. When I get to the hospice later, I’ll tell him about it. It won’t matter to him. It doesn’t really matter to me. The neighbors might appreciate it.

It’s just another of those many things that have to be done. All over the world, the lawns of dying people are being mowed.

update: The lawn is mowed. I can’t say it was fun, but it was a nice distraction. I’ve decided to do a yard chore every day until the brother checks out. Tomorrow I’ll power up his weed-eater and clear out this mess:

What I like about yard work is that there’s a clear, visible indication of how much work you’ve done. It’s oddly satisfying when you finish.

a little quiet time

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Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to quiet. I like it. More than that, I’ve come to need it. If stillness was a drug, I’d be a junkie. My body demands the periodic injection of solitude and silence.

I haven’t had it for the last couple of weeks.

You’d think sitting around a hospice room for hours with somebody who is heavily medicated against pain would be quiet. It’s not. For ten thousand reasons, it’s not. The hospice staff are always in motion. Visitors come and go. There’s always the sound of the hospital: the trundling of med-carts, the alarms, the clang and shuffle of housekeeping crews, the hiss-thwok of suction pumps. And, of course, even though he’s heavily medicated the brother still requires attention. There’s not much left of him now. His body is wasting away; his voice is just a thin, papery whisper; he sleeps most of the time. But now and then he opens his eyes and looks around—and when he does, I want him to see somebody who loves him.

The hospice has a second-floor balcony. Walls of glass shield it from wind and rain, but it’s open at the top to allow a bit of breeze. Sparrows fly in and out, and nest in some of the beams. They’re a messy bird, sparrows, but cheery and it’s pleasant to hear them.

We take the brother out to the balcony when he’s up to it. He sits and looks at the trees and listens to the sparrows, and appears to pay attention to our conversation. When he’s tired himself out—after fifteen or twenty minutes—and he’s being wheeled back to his room, I like to linger for a moment.

It’s not enough. It’s not enough for him or for me. But it’ll have to do.

little brother

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Family is a weird thing. This is Scott. Technically, he’s my cousin. In spirit, he’s something more like a brother. In fact, a few months ago my actual brother Jesse Eugene said this to me: “Don’t take this the wrong way–but you were gone for years and Scotty sort of took your place as my little brother.”

He’s been a good little brother (though, truth be told, it’s a wee bit difficult to think of Scott as a ‘little’ anything, given that he’s got the bulk and mass of a Sherman tank).

I shot this photograph in Jesse Eugene’s room at the hospice. Scott had just arrived (he’s been there every day) and sat down. The light from the window fell on his face and I sort of demanded he not move for a moment. We hadn’t really spoken at that point, other than to say hello. After shooting the photograph Scott told me he’d just heard that his best friend had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Wyoming.

It’s been a tough few days all around. There he was, sitting in the room where his ‘brother’ was slowly dying, thinking about his friend. And yet when asked to sit for a photo, Scott just quietly went along with it. Which is what brothers do.