Memento Mori

Joy can be contagious. When you see a broad and toothy smile, eyes squinted and creased at the corners, you can’t help but feel joy yourself. We often find ourselves smiling back at our photographs, feeling overcome with nostalgia, remembering that day fondly, or missing the people or time we are observing. It means even more to catch that momentary laughter, when the subject hasn’t had many reasons to smile. And just as quickly as it comes, the joy will abandon you when you remember that he is dead.

In the photo above, we will meet my dad. I say we because I, too, do not know him. He’s pictured here on a sticky, humid day in Houston, Texas. The year is 1989, and he has just become a father—my father. He is in the courtyard of his apartment, a run-down, low-income complex occupied mostly by immigrants. You can see the faded siding, a result of the blazing Texas sun, which is contrasted by nicely manicured landscaping. He has a huge smile, an authentic one that can be seen in every feature of his face. He may even be in mid-laugh. He is shirtless, exposing four tattoos. The one on his shoulder looks like a grave, but it is hard to tell what it actually is. It is in a sketchy prison style and all black. The one on his bicep is the profile of a woman with a spider web. She is my mother. On his bare chest you can see a tank top tan line and two more tattoos. There is a thick and dark scorpion tattoo, and another tattoo he received during one of his many incarcerations.

He has dress pants on and a belt to keep them from falling off his small, yet muscular frame. He always insisted on wearing dress pants, even in the intolerable heat and humidity. It was his way of presenting himself as someone to be respected. The unfortunate reality was, as a Vietnamese immigrant he was treated as second class in Texas. His proclivities tended to be unsavory at best, and illegal at worst. With few options as a teenage refugee, no knowledge of the English language, no family, and not enough money to survive, he quit his low-paying, abusive jobs and opted to chase money the easier way—with guns.

Along with the dress pants, he was always quite particular about his hair. Here it is thick and dark. It’s nicely styled with an unmistakable ’80s volume. It is impressive for someone with stick-straight, Southeast Asian hair texture. My mom is behind the camera. Perhaps she said or did something humorous to elicit this giant grin. What you cannot see here is the reality of living in poverty and crime. You cannot see the police sirens, the gunshots, the cockroaches, and yelling from the neighbors’ apartment. You can not see his prison record, the thefts he’s committed, his murder trial, the guns, the cocaine, or the violence.

Still, with this secondhand knowledge of the tumultuous life led by the man in the photo, to me, at first impression, this photograph is pure joy. It is a priceless moment in time of the person I never got to know. I see a man in love and happy, radiating his pride in being sober, out of jail, and having a new baby girl. You can, in some ways, still see the little boy inside of him. There is a glimpse of the person before the forced family separation, boats, and refugee camps. When we express pure happiness and excitement, it is the closest, as adults, we will get to our younger selves, before trauma, before pain, and before the worries and pressures of the world. In this moment he looks content, and he has nothing but promise and potential ahead of him. He is twenty-four and starting to plan out the life he wants and the life he will create for his family. He is trying to find a way to survive that does not involve crime and gang activity. This photo is now a cherished reminder of the parts of him that were good, and the parts of him that showed love. As writer Susan Lee Sontag muses, “Like a wood fire in a room, photographs—especially those of people … of the vanished past—are incitements to reverie” (16). This is how I choose to see him even after knowing the fate he will meet just after I turn two years old. The truth is, he was not able to fulfill the hopes he had in this snapshot, and his promise was snuffed out prematurely. He was gunned down in broad daylight, a victim of homicidal violence. It was an almost ironically karmic ending to his much too short life.

Because he is gone and left me before I had the opportunity to make memories of him, this photo also shows all things lost and things he and we will never become. I see experiences ripped away from me. I see hair that will never turn gray, smile lines that won’t become permanent fixtures of his face and eyes that will never shed a tear at my wedding. Earlier in her writing Sontag states “A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are memento mori” (15). This sentiment beautifully depicts the pull of negative emotions I experience today, holding his picture in my hands. In some ways, every single photograph we take will become a weapon to inflict pain on those that loved us once we are gone. To see someone on a piece of glossy paper that you will never get to hug, to smell, to hear and know their voice, is its own form of torture. I do not know the sound of the laugh that he’s making in this image. I sometimes can not bring myself to look at it because when I do, suddenly the hole in my heart rips wide open and the feelings of joy I caught by staring at that smile are replaced with tears and a feeling of profound deprivation.

The bias I have in glamorizing someone important to me that has passed is not the rule when observing this image. My mother looks upon it and is filled with memories, both beautiful and horrific. The man here to her, is much different than the one I daydream him to be within my imagination. He is the man that abandoned her, that put her in harm’s way, that cheated and lied to her, and disappeared for weeks at a time. He is also the man that loved her the most. He is the man that made her a mother and gave her the gift that saved her life and gave her purpose. She has a familiar but vastly different conflict when the memories of the photograph come flooding back to her. He left her just as much as he left me, but she is both punished and gifted with the shared experiences with him that I do not have.

My father used to refer to himself as “fey,” which means doomed or fated to die. He mentioned with frequency he would not be here long, as if to predict the future he knew he would not have. Perhaps this photo was for me, too little to remember the man shown here when it was taken. This photograph is an intentional donation of a laugh I will never hear. He is forever twenty-four, smiling into the sun, my mom making him grin ear to ear. The joy of that humid Texas day in 1989 will live forever through this image, but a photograph is only a moment in time, and eventually,

we all must die.