Beauty In Bereavement
The search for beauty. Think about that when you wake up tomorrow and ask yourself what life might look like if that was your goal. I look for it everywhere and I find it everywhere. Music, Film, People, Nature, Technology ... its always there just asking for us to seek it. It can't help you appreciate and love life on a deeper level. Always a continuum.
If you follow, lately I've been searching for it in a lot of photography. I'm not sure, but I think this has to do with the correlations between the art and my own career, something I promise I'll discuss a bit more about in length soon. But its a fancinating search, one that I can lose hours on if I'm not careful.
The other night while head deep in web code, I heard something come across the local news that peeked my interest. A family just north of where I live was about to give birth to a child. In normal circumstances, it would be the most exciting & memorable time of their life ... but their particular situation came with circumstances that was going to make it bittersweet. Their baby has a condition which will cause her death less than 24 hours after birth. There is no cure. No answer.
If my connection to this couple as a human being isn't enough, then my connection as a parent and parent-to-be with our own whirlwind of an emotional pregnancy is. There's no detour to their pain. Its going to pierce like a knife, only cutting deeper being preceded by a new life to call their own.
Apparently this isn't as rare as we all wish it was. The story went on to discuss a community of photographers that volunteer their time to help such families cherish the short moments they have with their newborns. The organization Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep handles the organization and training. I did a little digging around their site after the report devouring into my curiosity and I was unprepared to see some of the most definite and glaring examples of beauty in humanity I have ever seen.
Photographers creating eternal visual memories of a family's slight but momentous time with their dying newborns. That's beautiful.