Face to Face and Not a Photograph

There were three copies because he kept ruining them.

The first one lived in his wallet and went through the wash. The second one was in the truck for two summers and the sun took the color out of it, so his son's face went a strange orange and then most of the way to nothing. The third one is in a drawer inside a book, and he takes it out about twice a week, and he has begun to be careful with it in a way that frightens him.

Because here is what he worked out in the spring, and he has not said it to his wife.

When he tries to picture his son, he gets the photograph. Not the boy. The photograph. The particular angle of it, the squint from the sun, the shoulder of somebody who got cropped out. He can no longer summon the moving face, the one that talked and turned and looked annoyed at him across a workbench. He gets a still image, three by five, taken on a Tuesday nobody thought was important.

He is fifty six years old and his son has been dead for four years and the man is losing his face.

There is nobody he can say that to. His wife would be devastated and would blame herself for something. His daughter would be kind and would not understand. And there is a specific fear underneath it that he has never let get all the way to the surface: if this is what four years does, then what is the reunion? Do I get a photograph then too? Is that the best it gets?

Sit down on the tailgate. There is a real answer to that and it is better than you think.

What is happening to the face

First the honest mechanical part, because knowing it takes some of the guilt out.

A photograph competes with a memory and wins. That is not a moral failing and it is not you letting him go. Every time you look at the picture you are refreshing the picture, and every time you try to recall the face without it the picture arrives first because it is stronger and more recent. It is a known thing and it happens to everybody who keeps a photograph, and it happens fastest to the people who look at it the most, which means it is happening to you because of how much you loved him. Nothing written anywhere made a father the vessel that keeps his child in existence, and the Spirit has not been grading the four years on the sharpness of a Tuesday.

That is worth hearing plainly. The reason his face is going is not neglect. It is devotion, doing something you did not know it would do.

You have not lost him by losing the image. Nothing written anywhere makes your memory the container that holds your son, and the Spirit did not make the survival of a person conditional on how well anybody else can picture them.

The one who holds him is not you. That is the first thing to put down on the tailgate before anything else.

Then, face to face

Now the fear underneath it, which is the real question in this piece.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.1 Corinthians 13:12

Read what that says about now. It calls this present seeing dim and partial. Not wrong, not worthless, but a poor version, the way a face looks in the polished metal people used for mirrors when Paul wrote that sentence.

And then read what it says about after. Face to face. Know fully. The comparison is not between a photograph and a better photograph; it is between seeing badly and seeing properly for the first time.

So the answer to your question on the tailgate is no. You are not being handed a photograph at the end of this. What is written promises face to face and knowing fully, and the Spirit who inspired that line put it there against exactly this fear.

There is something else in it as well, and it is easy to miss. Even as I have been fully known. He is saying that God's knowledge of you has always been the complete kind, and that what is coming is your side catching up. Which means that right now, while you sit with a three by five in a book, your son is fully known by God. Nothing about him has faded on that side.

The moving face has not gone anywhere

Here is the practical part, and it is small and it is worth doing.

Memory is stored in more than pictures. Ask any of them and you will find the face comes back sideways: the sound of him coming up the drive, what he did with his hands when he was lying, the way he said one particular word wrong his whole life and never learned. Scripture keeps its own people that way as well, in fragments somebody bothered to write down. We have Peter warming his hands at a fire and Thomas wanting to touch something and a woman turning around in a garden when somebody said her name, and none of that is a portrait. It is a handful of moments, and it has been enough to carry those people to us for two thousand years. Those are stored somewhere the photograph does not compete with.

So use the other doors. Ask your daughter what she remembers of his voice. Ask the man he worked with what he was like at seven in the morning. You will get pieces you did not have, and some of them will open the moving face for about four seconds, and four seconds is not nothing.

You are allowed to go and collect him from other people. Nothing written anywhere makes grief a private trade, and the Spirit works through a family talking rather than through one man in a drawer twice a week.

And say something to your wife. Not the whole of it, if that is too much. Just that you look at the picture more than you have told her. She is almost certainly carrying a version of the same thing and has decided not to burden you with it, and two people protecting each other from the same information is how a house gets very quiet.