A Photograph of Fading Memories

This photo is my mother’s siblings,
all but Uncle Eddie, who died when he
was one month old, a “blue baby,” bad heart.
All the others now dead, too, of course,
the photo taken nineteen-thirty-eight.

Uncle Tom was first to go, the uncle
I didn’t really know at all, never even met
his first wife or their four kids, though I knew
his second wife and their two boys, but only
after he was dead. Slipped into a coma
having a pacemaker replaced. Never
regained consciousness. My only memory
of him sleeping on the eyelash of death,
my mother talking to her older brother
as if he could hear. Maybe he could.

Evelyn, my mother, was the next to go.
A difficult marriage; four kids, all boys;
she finally found fulfillment as a teacher,
special ed, trainable retarded was the term
back then; not allowed to use that term
today, but she used it, and she loved them.
Cancer killed her. A kind of cancer
only smokers and drinkers ever get,
though she herself had never smoked
or had one drop of liquor. Go figure.

The others made it to the 21st century,
though Uncle Vince just barely got there.
Worked for Joe the Motorist’s Friend
only to get cheated of his pension
when the company went bust.
I never heard him whine about it;
just went out and got another job,
and worked until his heart gave out
driving on an interstate highway,
my cousin Kathy saving her own life
and her mother’s, grabbing the wheel,
managing to get the car off the road
without colliding with a tractor-trailer.

Florence went next. Another bad heart,
perhaps. During the 2nd World War,
she’d met and married an army air corps
pilot who stayed in for thirty years,
then had a new career with Merrill Lynch.
I stayed with them in Birmingham
on my way from New Orleans to Farmingdale
to do a poetry reading for 50 bucks.
And one more time in Alpharetta
years later, doing interviews and research
for a book called Ordinary Lives.

I’m not sure what killed Alvera. Maybe
a failing heart, clearly a family defect,
killed her, too. She lived in Dundalk,
a modest rowhouse, husband worked
for Social Security, I think. Grandma Conti
lived with them when I was in the Corps.
I went to visit once, but Vera kept
her distance from her siblings, didn’t come
to Thanksgiving family gatherings,
some sort of tension that I never understood,
and no one ever talked about.

Something, perhaps, to do with Aunt Alberta,
who married a man who became a career
army chaplain, and they traveled the world.
Bert’s house had souvenirs and knick-knacks
from Germany, Korea, and everywhere
Vera had never gone and never would.
I tried to give Aunt Bert a copy of my
first book of poems: A Generation of Peace,
but she told me she didn’t need to read
about war, she knew about war,
her husband had been in two of them.
But as she aged, she mellowed, becoming
more attentive, more receptive.
By the time she died at ninety-eight,
I’d gotten very fond of her.

So there they are: my mother and her
siblings. All of them now dead and buried,
Together, they had twenty children,
some I know, some I haven’t seen
in decades, some I’ve never even met.
And so the generations go, one upon
the next, and one day no one living
will know a thing about the people 
in this photo. Not even their names.

W. D. Ehrhart's most recent books are a 2025 collection of poems, Smart Fish Don't Bite from Moonstone Arts, and Getting Shot At: Essays on War, Conflict & Culture Clash, which was released this year with McFarland & Company, Inc. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wales at Swansea and taught English and history at The Haverford School from 2001 to 2019.