The Young Woman in the Photograph

The Young Woman in the Photograph

I sat looking at the small black and white photograph of a young woman who still had a lifetime of experience ahead of her. I was struck by the contrast to the image in my head of the same woman, old and withered, lying in a hospital bed waiting to die.

How could the young woman in the photograph have known she would eventually have seven children, one of whom would die shortly after birth, or that she would live to bury another after he died alone by the side of a dark country road?

As I sat by her bedside I wondered if the happier moments of her life were enough to balance the sacrifices she made, or the pain and sorrow she endured so her children could live a good life. Was she able to experience any of the hopes and dreams she had as the young woman in that photograph?

And what of her past, in the years before that photograph, before she was married. I know she grew up on a small farm in Ontario. I know she had a sister and brother, and parents who loved her. I remember visiting the farm that had long since been abandoned and was a mere weathered remnant of the happy place she told me about. I mostly remember the look of sadness on her face when she walked around the old homestead and how she brightened when she told the tale of her brother discovering a large tortoise down by the creek and how he rode on its back.

I wonder why she didn’t share more of her past. Why it took another old photograph of three young girls, looking oh so happy, to share that she and her two friends use to sing on the radio in Canada during the Second World War.  It is only a scrap of a memory I have today of her days as a girl growing up. I would have loved hearing about her joys and her heartbreaks, but she believed the story of her life was one no one would care about or want to hear.

Sadly, she was wrong. Everyone has a story that should be told. We are, each of us, a piece in the puzzle of humanity. Without the story we are like the young girl in the photograph, a question without an answer.

©2013 Marvin Allan Williams