Mourning on Film

“The camera circles, probing for the perfect picture of grief.”

It was the middle of the seventies.  I was in a band then like everyone else and we played together and stayed together far too much, hanging out ferociously and fightingand making up like the family we almost were.  We even traveled together--car trips mostly, exploring, driving here and there, bumming around in that magic golden time between college and responsibility. 

Once we went to the Shenandoah National Park, only a couple of hours from where I live in Richmond, Virginia.  We drove up the Skyline Drive to Bear Fence Mountain, a stopping point that has a short hike up to an incredible view.

The trail was just steep enough to make you think you were working and we burst out near the top exhilarated—and stopped short.  There were four people on the summit, a woman and three men sitting cross-legged in a line, holding each other.  They all had on blue jeans, the men with that kind of short hair you could tell had just recently been pony tails.

We had made a terrific racket coming up but they didn't move.  We looked at each other, then shrugged and sat down and waited for them to give up the view.  We told a few jokes and settled who owed what for gas.  Then our singer started "Shenandoah"--slow and appropriate, and while it rolled along the woman detached herself from the group and started filming with a small home-movie camera.  When she went in for a closeup I noticed they were crying.  All of them were crying.

"Shenandoah" was over and our singer started something fast.  I don't remember what, but it was raucous and rock'n'roll-y and a minute later the woman came down.

"Excuse me."  Her voice was Northeastern.  "Would you people mind leaving?  We'll be gone shortly but in the meantime we'd like to be alone.  You see, we're mourning the death of our father."

  She left and we shut up, stunned.  Then our born again, wise guy singer yelled, "Blessed are they who mourn on film!" and we ran down the mountain like kids who had hit a car with a snowball, the woods echoing our hysterical, uncomfortable laughter.

  This is the point in the story where the writer is expected to pull back and explain, to draw the threads of the narrative together and tie them all up neatly with a moral for a bow.  But I can't do that.  I know the incident has meaning--if it didn't it wouldn't have stayed with me all these years.  But what that meaning is I have yet to understand.

I do know that "mourning on film" says a lot about the seventies, the coming-of-age decade for the first generation raised on TV.  We're the opposite of those often-cited tribesmen who were afraid that their souls would be stolen by the camera.  For us, an event doesn't have a soul--isn't real--until we've gotten it down on film.  The vacation snapshots are as important as the vacation.  Without photographic evidence the wedding doesn't exist. 

Perhaps the group was trying to convince themselves—or someone else-- of the reality of their emotion.  Or maybe they were engaged in something completely different and the woman said the first thing that came into her mind that she thought would make us go away.    

Interesting speculations.  Having made them, I’m no closer to the essence of what actually happened than I was when I started.  It remains unresolved, persistent in my memory, the mourners still clutching each other and crying while the camera circles, probing for the perfect picture of grief.