A few weeks ago I stumbled across two boxes of old family photographs, part of the stash of personal belongings that I had shipped out from Hawaii to join me in Malaysia, when we moved here in 2008. Eager to begin 2011 with reduced clutter in my life I began scanning the deteriorating photographs into my Apple Mac computer. But this simple archiving task quickly evolved into a journey towards releasing long-held pain from my emotional body. But this is a personal process I would never recommend to any of my clients. Why? Because I now have come to accept that once this scanning process is completed I will burn the paper photographs.
In early 1998, only a few months after her cerebral stroke my mother had handed me a small collection of degraded black and white photographs, along with color ones mostly taken with poor-resolution cameras. There were no identifying dates on the back of each photos, and they begin the year she met my father, James Henry Ramsden, in her home town of Morecambe, Lancashire, in 1952.
This was her private treasure trove of memories. “No one else is interested in these”, she told me, as she placed an ancient manila envelope and plastic-sheeted photo album into my hands. She then paused, and looked meaningfully at me. “You will know what to do with them.”, she said. Then we both fell silent. In retrospect she must have secretly known was about to die. She was handing over to me something very precious; the memories of her life.
Three months later my mother suffered a fatal second stroke at 65 years of age, and I quickly flew back to England for her funeral service. Anyone who has suddenly lost their mother may identify with the feeling state that enshrouded me … a kind of numbness and shock unlike any other. It is the sense of suddenly becoming an orphan in the world. You can’t imagine it until it happens to you, and you know you will never quite be the same again afterwards.
As her coffin was about to roll into the sliding wall of Blackpool’s Park Crematorium on that cold Lancashire day in March 1998 I suddenly saw my mother for the last time, but not as I remembered her. The ghostly form that rose from the coffin – and who cheerily waved at me as she ascended towards the ceiling- was a girl of about eighteen years old. It was the girl in the old photographs in the manila envelope. It was Norma Winifred Turner, and in her spirit body she was a young woman. And she was leaving the world smiling, and dressed in white.
So here, on the winter solstice of 2010 in North Borneo, I find myself scanning fading photographs long into the night, and staring with amazement at the detail each digital image reveals. Here are the faces and bodies of my heritage. Given time Photoshop will clean up the smudges and the torn edges, but I’m astounded at the palpable energetic release that occurs as each old photograph is processed: moving from paper image to digital file. Clearly there is an energetic possession infused into each paper keepsake. I can feel it emotionally, as the pile of scanned photographs next to my computer grows larger. I now know with certainty that these, my mother’s memories, have finished their journey. Norma Winifred Turner – and the world she lived in – has long since gone. It will soon be time to cremate these photographs, and to complete the release of their emotional attachment to the past.
Owning these photographs over the last twelve years has helped me come to terms with the loss of my mother. One day soon I will send a copy of all the digital files to my brother Wayne in England, and post a few of my favorites here on my web site, and then I am done. The cycle of my mother’s life will be completed with the dissolution of her keepsakes. And I, her eldest son, can also move on.
© 2013 by Dean Ramsden. All rights reserved.