Eulogy

When she grew up, she avoided photos like the plague.

I think it was because she knew photos never truly caught her. You know how some people, photogenic people, look just like themselves in every photo? They’re full of life and look natural and easy. Like the photo is the best of them, the sum total of what and who they are.

She wasn’t like that. She always looked stiff and self-conscious in them, like they were some kind of identification or evidence she didn’t want circulated. Photos of her looked like the stuff she had left behind, like potato peelings, or wood shavings. The stuff that was unnecessary to the task at hand. The stuff ultimately thrown out with the other garbage.

She said she wanted to be remembered in 3-D; moving about, talking, laughing, singing, laughing, crying.

It was hard enough to get to know her in real life; in photos, she almost wasn’t there. In every picture, even the not-half-bad ones, she looked blurry, dead-eyed, uninteresting. That was really it, wasn’t it? Photos made her look dull and unremarkable – a person you probably wouldn’t care to know.

Photos, she said, were proof you had been here. Photos told a story; photos remembered. All she would leave behind were words, a voice, a song. They would have to tell her story.

She was only passing through. In time, no one would remember what she looked like.