How to change a life
“Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out”
Everyone in the photograph above is dead.
This picture was taken on May 27, 1926 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Even the kids in the back, the children’s choir, practicing for the International Eucharist Congress are dead. Many of them lived to old age. Some of them died in one of the 20th century’s coming wars. Perhaps someone died the day this photo was taken.
I often stop to think, when looking at old photographs, about the weight of what I know about the world to come of which no one in the picture has any awareness. Perhaps there is a word for this sensation in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—the feeling of looking at a picture of a person from the past and knowing what the future holds for them.
In the moment of the photograph, someone smiles or sings or walks dully along with no awareness of what is coming their way. But I know.
The sensation is easy to dismiss when looking at backs in a nameless crowd, but I feel this acutely when watching videos of notable people right after they have died. A politician or celebrity is talking with the interviewer about their stand on an issue or their next film or what they had for dinner last night, and I am watching their innocence with the knowledge that in two weeks or months or hours, the person will no longer be making movies or having meals. They will no longer be…anything.
It makes me think about the choices that alter a life—sometimes tragically, and sometimes benignly, but always, magically.
During the jury experience that’s now over, I watched video of an accident—the impact between two vehicles caught on camera. Repeatedly, the lawyers would rewind and play the video , reexperiencing the few last seconds before two people’s lives changed forever.
At five seconds before the accident, the wheels of the truck appear out the window.
At three seconds before the accident, watch the man in back row look over to his left.
At the moment of the accident, watch the man in the front almost fall out of his seat.
In reviewing these tapes, I could not help but think about the denouement—the moment at which the end we were viewing became unavoidable, when the disparate threads that led to this moment became irrevocably entangled.
At one second, everything was fine. At the next second, it was not.
At one second, people are thinking about their day, and in the next second, they are not.
