Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep: Bereavement Photography, the Modern Memento Mori, and a Brief Look at Public Grief Work
The black-and-white image centers on a tiny fist–thick with delicious pudge and creases of fat on chunky fingers. These are prime pat-a-cake hands, ready for kisses and wrapping around grown-up fingers as the tiny body it’s attached to stumbles through its first steps. The squishy digits clasp a silver ring, some made-in-China disposable that would go on to be eternalized in more ways than its humble origins might have foretold.
Another image peeps a passerby look, as if stealing a glimpse through a telescope, at a sleeping face, partly obscured by life-saving measures, another tiny fist, and, this time, a shock of dancing hair.
Of the memories I have of that day, Boston’s hair might be the most vivid, those soft whispers of red like the summer wind that carried him away. While, admittedly, these aren’t my most treasured of photos, they tell a story and light a legacy that otherwise might have been lost with me.
They’re the only professional photos my baby ever had. In the gap, they represent every school photo, every graduation photo, potential engagement, a maybe-but-no-more wedding. Photos of his own potential children.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep was founded by the bereaved parents of Maddux Achilles Haggard, who was born on February 4, 2005. Maddux was born with a terminal, congenital diagnosis that ultimately led to his death just shy of a week later. His mother, like many new mothers, stood at a cornerstone between possibility and hope, and the vast arbitrariness of time. And, like many newly bereaved mothers, Mrs. Haggard wanted to capture the life of her son in a way that honored both his life and his death.
Haggard’s was a labor of devotion to a son she cherished, who was taken far too soon, but who nonetheless deserved a spot on the wall next to her other children. This prompted her to create heirloom-quality photos of her dying baby. This desire to grasp on to any meaning-making she could in the short life of her son would expand to include the creation of legacies for countless other lost infants.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, an organization started based on Haggard’s desire to remember and capture her son’s brief life, now celebrating its 20th anniversary, has gifted this legacy of heirloom photography to over 75,000 grieving families at absolutely zero cost to the families. Volunteer professional photographers donate their time and skill to capture little glimpses of short, powerful lives. During Covid-19, NILMDTS even fast-tracked a program to train nurses and other medical professionals in basic photography skills so that the pandemic did not get in the way of the needed portraiture.
While Death photography is hardly a modern phenomena, exploding in the West particularly during Victorian England due to the rise in photography as well as memento mori culture, cultural approaches to public displays of grief and bereavement, especially in a modern world, have largely remained rather conservative and evasive, as if acknowledging death in more than hushed euphemisms might call it upon the speaker. This is particularly prominent in the world of perinatal loss, where the personhood of the loss is often called into question, as if life is arbitrary and trivial if not adequately situated on an acceptable chronological timeline. While NILMDTS did not and, arguably, does not have a central mission of creating a space for public bereavement dialogue, its cultural impact on the acceptance of public discourse surrounding child and infant loss cannot be denied or overstated.
Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, alongside other child loss initiatives of the 2010s onward, including various social media groups and other loss organizations such as Molly Bears, has had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of public grief expressions and acceptance. The photographs captured have served not only to capture the very brief essence of a life, but also to further the public narrative of those navigating the throes of cultural grief discourse.
Boston’s photos tell a story for me that I don’t always have the words to capture. The story is incomplete and only shades of gray, but the narrative remains nevertheless.
For more information about Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, or to make a donation see Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep the website. Follow NILMDTS on social media, including Facebook and Instagram.
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