Sometimes I’m caught off guard when I read the local obituaries. It’s not the words that puzzle me; it’s the photo that often accompanies them.
Case in point: A woman, eighty-eight years old, passed away recently; but the photograph that accompanied the synopsis of her life revealed a beautiful young woman. The only thing that belied her age was the hair-do, because it was something out of the nineteen thirties.
Obviously this woman may have resembled the younger photo in her later years, but she would have been an older version of it. Most likely with a more updated hair-do. And this made me wonder why a family would provide a particular photo for an obituary.
Perhaps it was a favorite photo either of the deceased or of someone in the immediate family. Perhaps it was what they found on the spur of the moment in course of their grief. Perhaps she had refused to have her photo taken in later years, so there was no current picture to provide.
I’ll never know the real reason behind every youthful photo that accompanies the obituary of someone in his or her seventies or eighties. But I will always be curious as to why the particular pose was chosen.
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