This last week I had the sense that time was both rushing past and standing still at the same time.
I was in a silversmithing workshop. It belonged to my grandfather and although he died over a decade ago yet the workshop remains almost as he left it. It smells the same; metally and musty - a mixture of things. A half-finished spoon lay on top of the bench, somewhere between a sheet of silver and its intended shape. It was there as if he had put it down yesterday and forgot about it after going inside to get some tea and then getting distracted with some other side project in one of the other (many) sheds.
Inside the house, I have been going through my father’s old photos. There are many, many photos from every stage in his peripatetic life. There are photos from New Zealand, Jersey, boarding school, the Navy, Malawi and India (embarrassingly colonial). There are formal photos of him in uniform and photos in which the taker and/or subject were (probably) drunk af. There are photos of him dancing, flying planes and drinking with his friends. There are pictures of him and various animals (snakes, elephants and a dog wearing a blonde wig with pigtails). I see my father at every stage of his life all at once. I see a photo of him in 1979 with the same person who, would one day sit opposite his daughter in a tiny boat and pour his ashes into the sea.
These photos are not like a carefully curated and filtered Instagram feed. Most of them are imperfect and blurry (analogue). Some are just boring (so many pictures of the same dog). But they make me happy. I only ever really knew my dad as a sick and unhappy person but here I see someone so alive and full of joy. These photos are honest snapshots of a life well lived. And it is better to lose someone knowing that they have lived well.
I peruse the faces in his boarding school photos and wonder what became of the other boys. I remember that scene in Dead Poets Society (1989) when Mr Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students to look into the faces of boys in the old school photos they walk past every day. “These boys are now fertilizing daffodils,” he tells them.
I Google Robin Williams and read that, in 3 days, it will be the tenth anniversary of his death. Although he too is fertilizing daffodils, the speech lives:
“If you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day— make your lives extraordinary."
These blurry photos remind me to do that.