Taken for granite

"Everyone breaks a little sometimes." 

-- J. Kenner, Release Me 

 

Broken angel  9-1-13

"... the wounds of the past and the scars of the present 

don't disfigure me in your eyes ..."

-- John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

"He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

-- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I went to the cemetery yesterday, searching for faces.

I was looking for new material, but I also wanted to revisit a couple of familiar faces that I've photographed in the past.

One of my favorites is an enormous monument bearing the stone image of a larger-than-life angel. I photographed her several years ago, and wanted to do so again for this year's 365 days project.

I have a large framed photo of this angel on my bedroom wall. I shot the photo in 2004 and it is one of my all-time favorites. I love it because of the way it captures the combined sense of strength and sadness, power and helplessness, spirituality and humanity. I was eager to see her again.

After meandering around the winding roads cris-crossing the cemetery and successfully finding a handful of interesting new faces, I made my way over to where she stands.

My heart went cold. I felt sickened by the sight.

She'd been damaged.

Broken.

Her nose was completely gone, along with most of her upper lip. In their place, dead-center on her lovely angel face, a disfiguring, jagged, gaping granite wound.

I have no idea how it happened.

Natural disaster?

It's an old cemetery with lots of trees. Perhaps a branch fell during a storm.

Cemetery vandals?

God, I hope not.

Despite the damage, I photographed her anyway.

I was deeply moved by the beauty of the images I was seeing.

It wasn't the perfect beauty of the past, but beauty of a grittier sort. Even though her face was badly scarred, this angel somehow still conveyed that same combined sense of strength and sadness, power and helplessness, spirituality and humanity.

Maybe even more so.

The way she looks now ... it's like she gets it, she understands, she knows something about pain and damage, about scars and wounds, because she's been there. You get the impression that she can sympathize with the sadness and loss and tragedy that surrounds her, because she's seen it up close.

You know she knows how it feels.

You know she's felt the hard impact.

You can see it all over her beautiful face.

Love in the time of Cholera

"He was still too young to know 

that the heart's memory eliminates the bad 

and magnifies the good,

and that thanks to this artifice 

we manage to endure 

the burden of the past."

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Cemetery statue 8-23-13

Cemetery statue (2) 8-23-13

One of my favorite places to look for faces is in cemeteries. Often, among the headstones, obelisks, monuments and memorials, there are statues standing sentinel over the lost lives beneath their feet.

This statue towers over the grave of the Wilber family in a cemetery near Vermilion, Ohio.

According to the engravings, the Wilber's lost four children in a span of  seven days, between January13th and 19th, 1893. Their names were Jess, May, Roy and Ruby. Jess was 11, May was 9, and the twins, Ruby and Roy, just three months shy of their 3rd birthday.

At the feet of the statue is a separate plot with the four children's individual headstones, under an arch that says "Our Darlings."

I don't know what claimed the lives of these children, but I'd guess they were victims of the Cholera pandemic of 1881-1896.

This face really got to me.
I love how the way time, the weather and the elements have eroded the lines through the surface so that it looks, even on a bright sunny day, as if this woman, this mother, is weeping eternally for her lost "darlings." The tear tracks are etching away at the stone, rivulets carving ever deeper, slowly, pooling over her heart before running away.

She is holding, barely, a little book that simply says "Memory." The letters aren't engraved, but raised. To me it looks as though this woman is intentionally tipping the book to let the letters tumble to the earth as if she might rid herself of the terrible memories. Of course, she can't, because the words are trapped forever in stone. That breaks my heart.

I see strength and serenity in this face, the face of grief holding on, barely, to a thin volume of what was, and what was lost.