Autumn, Life, Loss and Light
As long as I’ve been taking photographs, Autumn has been my favourite time of the year for photography. I love both the colour and the light, and there’s something cosy about the impending dark days of winter that makes it a special time of year.
I’ve talked about this many times on my blog.
Being at the northern latitude of Ireland, we get gorgeous light as the days shorten. As October becomes November, long mornings are bathed in the golden rays of the sun, right up until midday. The leaves on the trees are turning from rich green, to deep oranges and reds. It’s like nature is throwing logs on the fire place to warm us up for the cold winter ahead.
When I look back through my photographic archives, I have lots of fond memories of getting some great photos in Autumn. I used to spend as much time as I could out shooting, trying to capture every aspect of the season. But recently I’ve struggled, both with capturing images, and photography in general. What was my favourite time of the year, has become an incredibly difficult one.
A few years ago my Mother passed away in October. She had a short but difficult illness, and it took me a long time to come to terms with the grief of loosing her. You can see other people going through loss but you don’t really understand it until it happens to you. Movies and TV shows do a great disservice to grief. When someone dies in a tv programme, the rest of the cast are usually over it in an episode or two. This is not what it’s like in real life at all. It breaks your brain, and it breaks your heart, and it takes a long time for them to work properly again. The way I’ve tried to describe it is that it’s like a process running in the background on your computer, taking up resources. You don’t always see it or are aware of it, but it’s there, constantly running, taking its toll.
I took time off after my mom died. I couldn’t deal with the stresses of work at the same time. I dived into photography, and I put aside my design and television work. Photography became my therapy in a way. Slowly I went back to it, and in a way it was healing. I was getting back to normal, and then the pandemic hit.
I read somewhere an article that described the mental health effects fo the pandemic as a national trauma. And this is true. It might not affect you straight away, but like with grief, it gnaws away at you in the background.
In the midst of all this, my Dad passed away last year. He didn’t die from Covid, but covid made his death much harder on everyone. He died in October, a week after my Mother’s anniversary. We could only visit him one at a time in the hospital due to the safety restrictions, and at his funeral, there was a reduced amount of people who could attend. We didn’t even get to see anyone afterwards. The whole thing became surreal and distant. It was like something we say on TV that happened to someone else, rather than this terrible thing that had happened to us. It was hard to accept that it had even happened because the world was turned so upside down anyway. I also know that what we’ve gone through, millions of other families have also had to face over the past two years, and some far worse, not even getting to see their loved ones.
Now, a year later, Autumn has become bittersweet. It is now forever associated with loss and grief, but still, I try to see the beauty in the world around. Life is still very surreal. I want to enjoy the light and the colour again, even though it’s now tinged with sadness. It is thanks to my father that I am into photography in the first place. He was an avid photographer all his life, and so when I take up a camera, I will always think of him. It only just occurred to me that this is probably why I’ve found Photography so difficult over the past year. I hadn’t even realised it until writing this.
It’s that pesky background process again.
I’ve been getting out more lately though. I am trying to get back to photography, and now that Autumn is in full bloom, it’s an ideal opportunity. They say that when it comes to healing after a loss, part of the journey is being able to remember the good times about your loved one without it being drowned out by the pain. For me, getting to enjoy Autumn again is kind of a metaphor for this.
While the pandemic rumbles on, it’s too soon to say anything about normality, and maybe sometime in the future, we can process everything that happened. But for now, once again, photography is becoming a therapeutic tool for me, and slowly, one step at a time, I’m beginning to enjoy the process again.
One Autumn leaf at a time.
