✷ immortalizing a leaf
Written on October 21, 2023
Today I found a nice leaf on the asphalt -- a sugar maple leaf, bright red. I took it back to my dorm and decided to make a true-to-life illustration of it, because this leaf deserved to last beyond the fleeting lifespan it would have. I wanted to immortalize this leaf. I started by laying the leaf on the paper and marking where each of its five points were, then copying the shape of the leaf freehand. But what I noticed, coming back to the leaf after an hour, was that the shape was different -- the top part of the leaf had curled over facing backwards, and the outermost edges were crumpling inwards slightly. The leaf itself had darkened and dulled in color too since I picked it up. It was no longer the same leaf, even as it was being rendered. Its straight-red hue that it had originally had existed only in my memory.
It made me think of Nana, my grandmother, who is disappearing into Alzheimer's. I want to make a portrait of her, to pin down the version of her that is exactly as I remember, which is why I've been trying to write down all the memories of her my brain comes up with so they aren't lost. A portrait with words. But Nana is disappearing even as I do this. I can't record the sound of her laugh when child-me used to say something on-the-nose, or how she used to always respond "you little stinker!" Or the wide grin she would have. I only have one photo of her laughing like that on my phone, from when I was showing her how to take a selfie. But even then, she wanted the picture to be of me and not her, so in the picture I'm in front, obscuring her face a little. She never made things about her, it always revolved around her family and her grandchildren. Photos with her in them were almost always staged group photos, not simple shots focusing on one person the way my generation takes photos. It makes it hard to separate the individual from their social environment, hard to do a single portrait just of her. But maybe that notion of an individualized identity isn’t true to her anyway. Surrounded by family is exactly how she always wanted to be.
I can’t go back in time and freeze every moment. Nana is disappearing just like the leaf was disappearing. The best I can do is capture my memories with her and hope that between the lines the real person shines through.
It feels like a very weak tribute, like trying to create a connect-the-dots picture. If you lay down enough dots, enough memories, you can draw a picture of what the person was like, but it’s a two-dimensional image that will never fully encapsulate them.
But maybe the version of a person that only exists in our memories has just as much of a right to exist, to be preserved, if we cannot preserve the person themself. Because that is who they were to us --- the person in our memories. And that is what matters.