On July 16, 2006, three-quarters of the way through the walk across the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin, as I ogled the Bay below, a man stopped me to ask if I was okay. This is one of those moments that you, the teller and rememberer, barely believe: I didn’t cry. My voice didn’t even crack thanking him. This wouldn’t have been astounding any other day, not that I had walked the bridge before. (I also haven’t since.) It was baffling that afternoon because I was on my way to the celebration of my boyfriend’s life, who seventeen days earlier had leapt off the bridge to his death. His nose was practically ripped off of his face. I did a lot of reading about jumping deaths in the aftermath of this. They are exponentially gnarlier than I’d ever allowed myself to imagine – which, mercifully, I hadn’t had occasion to. It’s miraculous his body was as in tact as it was. His nose was whole, and the mortuary magicians managed to make him look completely like himself, a fact confirmed by how the celebration began with an open casket. This was my first encounter with a human corpse. I held him a while, and scattered kisses on his lips and forehead, the way we used to tease each other about – it’s so papal. It didn’t feel brave in the moment, it only felt right. Necessary. I was happy to see him, to drink in his handsomeness. Looking at someone dead is not the same as looking at them asleep, but I’d spent a fair bit of my time that summer doing the latter. I was used to looking at him with his eyes closed, and I liked it. His eyes were an oceanic blue, the physical trait I found most erotic. I treated them like an eclipse – potentially dangerous, and constitutionally impossible for me not to want to steal a peek at. It was easier to really consider him as a person with them shut. I didn’t ask myself what might be going on under the lids to require them to be so. I spent a long time at his side. I felt lucky to have status. I was his girlfriend, I was allowed to linger. Really, I milked it. It was he, Eric Fagan, who introduced me to reciprocal romantic love, with sex. I wanted to watch him do anything and everything. He made the world enormous, thrilling and delectable in a way that, until dating him, until falling in love with him in a way that was so tumultuous while completely calm, I’d not considered possible. Your first love, famously, changes your life. Their choice to end their own would only naturally change yours, too. I had my camera with me. I almost always have a camera – not a phone! – on me, this wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that I abstained from photographing him, despite wanting to. I wasn’t afraid of forgetting what I was looking at, nor was there anyone in particular I wanted to make sure saw exactly what I was seeing, the motivating forces behind so many of my pictures. Maybe I was just digesting the disgusting fact that I’d become a cliché; I’d fallen in love and let myself fall into a glorious hole of enamorment where I didn’t take many pictures of him. I kissed every inch of his body, I showered with him, I fell asleep by him in at least fifteen different positions (for a while, I counted; the first time I slept at his house, it was because I inadvertently fell asleep while stretching – in child’s pose, in the house of a man twenty-five years my senior, is it not amazing that I have no instinct towards poetry?), I ate food he cooked, I did drugs I’d never done or liked before in his company, I collected all kinds of treasure I thought would delight him, I wrote letters to my friends about how he made Frank Sinatra seem cool and had a nose that wrinkled in a precious particularly feminine way when he laughed, I blew all manner of things off to steal minutes where I could smell him, but I didn’t take many pictures. I thought I had more time. It never occurred to me, not really, that I didn’t have infinite time. He was the first important person in my life beyond my grandparents to die. My grandparents had senesced. He waved goodbye to me one day at the pre-school where we worked, and disappeared.
On June 30, 2023, I traversed a small swath of Paris carrying a large, unsurprisingly heavy urn full of my father’s ashes. This urn was a replacement; the original had been plastic. While my uncle, aunt and I were traveling from the mortuary to my uncle’s apartment, the box specifically designed to carry the urn broke, the urn took a hard fall on the floor of a Métro station, and a tiny puff of my dad’s incinerated body escaped out into the ether. I laughed. I thought, immediately, that this was partly him allowing me to do what I thought he’d have wanted in the first place – obtain a more dignified vessel. My uncle helped me talk the mortuary into giving us a free replacement. I picked a mottled dark green one made of marble. Marble you expect to be heavy. I took a long walk home, past the planetarium, through the park, cradling the urn like a baby. I would later carry it, on multiple trains, from Paris to our family home in Cap Ferret. There is an occasional twinge in my lower back I suspect is a scar from that journey. At some point during the range between those summers– seventeen years, not much less than the length of time I’d been alive when Eric decided he could no longer be – I began photographing any dead animal I encountered. Maybe this was a muscle I wanted to build up so that the next time I came face to face with the corpse of someone I loved, I’d have the nerve to photograph them. It’s true that for a long, long time, photographs have, for me, been tangible proof of importance. But, joke’s on me! I brought a camera to the hospital where I spent an overnight vigil with my father, Henry Charles Pinkham, before learning he’d been braindead the entire time. I brought it back to the hospital when I went to say goodbye to his corporal form, and I let the sweet nurses I’d befriended during my overnight know, explicitly, that I was going to photograph him. No one blinked. Maybe no one would have about my impulse to photograph Eric, either. I’ll never know. I don’t know if you regret one hundred percent of the photographs you don’t take. I have learned that I, at least, tend to remember them. I took a lot of photographs of dad in the hospital. I took plenty more in the wake of his death, as I sojourned in Paris and at the beach. A lot of those photographs came out, despite my learning that that camera, which had been my mother’s, a gift from my dad the last time I saw him alive, has an odd tendency to fog sporadic rolls. There’s no diagnosable obvious light leak. There’s no rhyme or reason to when a roll will or not process correctly. Plenty of photographs I’m certain I’ll never look at again came out just fine. But not a single photograph of him is decipherable. Not even the entire roll was fogged, and some photographs are less marred than his. I can’t explain it, nor can I name the numbers of hours I wept when I found out. Not all the photographs of animals I’ve taken have come out, either. I’ve relaxed into the fact that it’s my effort that matters. Death is a big deal; it has to be, since life is. Death matters. It deserves to be looked at. And every chipmunk, and grasshopper, and water bug, and raccoon, and groundhog, and pigeon, and rat, and possum, and deer, and frog, and bunny, and seal, whether roadkill (interesting, isn’t it, that the word’s not driverkill? Do, please, be careful.), or an obvious casualty of another animal, or a mysteriously, simply no longer living creature I find as I go about my precious, already decently long life – I outlived Eric three years ago – gets to know that I stopped to give them a long, loving look. I looked the longest and the lovingliest at two of the men who’ve mattered most in my life. I know it’s inaccurate to say I have nothing to show for it, but more days than not, I wish I had their last photographs.