Notes from the Death Class

Welcome new subscribers! I’m Wendy C. Ortiz, an author of three books, a therapist, a parent, and the chauffeur of Mommy’s El Camino. This is the 6pm Pacific Sunday post that you can expect to see each and every week, in the form of either an essay, a vignette, a fragment, a letter, a conversation, or an image. The Sunday post may or may not be about the “writing life,” or, you know, just LIFE. Today’s is about DEATH. There’s no paywall today because you can’t paywall away death! And you can’t talk about death without talking about life, so I’ll conclude today’s missive with some LiFe NoTeS. Thanks for subscribing.

Before the death writing class I was throwing away photo albums whole. I’ve been a lifelong documentarian: I’ve moved houses carrying boxes upon boxes of albums that I’ve collected since middle school, when I first had a camera and film and began archiving aspects of my own life.

The process has been simple: I open photo albums and rapidly thumb through them, pulling out the photos I want to keep, not thinking too deeply about what it might mean to lose entire images. Haven’t I retained some of these images in my consciousness? There’s an understanding that many of the images my brain keeps do not translate into hard copy images I need to keep. I will only ever be able to describe them if there is a need to. If I can remember. The image of me in a bed in Las Vegas, twenty years old, holding a massive bottle of champagne with a strange man lying in the bed beside me. Images of me with an old friend who had done some harm to me, if not directly, then in harmful behaviors in general. Duplicate images of people I barely know or remember. A girl I had a crush on that I could not admit to myself at the time, a pillow being passed from my hand to hers on our high school campus. The meanings of these images have died. Their meanings had to die before I could throw them in the trashcan. The remaining photos are another project—I envision going through them all once more and letting more die until I am left with only enough photos for one album.