On photo albums and mortality

A few weeks ago, my parents received an influx of old photo albums and miscellaneous pictures that had belonged to my grandpa. The nostalgia sparked by these photos prompted my mom to unearth the old photos that had belonged to her parents as well. As you'd expect, there were many I'd never seen before. (There were also many I had seen - as a child I was very much obsessed with family history and the past in general. Come to think of it, I still am.)

I love seeing people I know now at impossibly young ages, and it's fascinating to look at candid photos of relatives who died long before I was born. It also gave me an uncomfortable feeling, though - one that was more pronounced now than it ever was when I was a little girl. In a way, it's hard to reconcile all the fun everyone is having in those old pictures with the fact that they're all dead now. It's hard to articulate exactly why, but it seemed like the people in the photos were somehow duped. Like, "Oh, look at you laughing and having a great time at this party ... but now it's seventy years later, and you're dead. So what did that matter, really?" Of course, it's pretty much impossible to have such musings without extrapolating. It's not as if death is something that just happened to them, after all. So what of all the happy family pictures we take now, and pictures of myself and my friends? Is it inevitable that someday they'll lose the meaning they have now - the actual meaning of each photo - and just serve as bittersweet and sobering reminders of mortality to future generations? I mean that in the least morbid way possible (which, um, is still pretty morbid) but be honest - can you truly look at any photo from a long time ago and see it simply for what it is? Don't you always imbue it with a little extra meaning; some extra significance it was never meant to have? And is it somehow selfish not to want that for myself?

"Oh, look at you laughing and having a great time at this party ... but now it's seventy years later, and you're dead. So what did that matter, really?"

Looking at all of those pictures, I thought it over. And it does matter. Every little thing that's happening in those photos is important. If the inevitable end were all that mattered, then nothing would ever matter at all. In an odd way, the fact that life is fleeting, the fact that we get so little time in the grand scheme of things, blah blah, etc., means that those little things - the happy and annoying and momentous and humdrum moments captured in those snapshots - are the only things that matter. I guess it's human nature to attach extra meaning to many things that should be simple. We're mostly powerless to avoid it. I can accept that, as long as we can also take a step back and realize what we're doing. As for my pictures, I feel like writing on the back of some of them. "This is a party. Yeah, we'll all die someday. So what? It's a party."