Vaya con Dios, Tia Caroline

Caroline Hendrickson in 2008; Oakland, Calif.

I’ve been ruminating today over the life and times of my aunt Caroline Hendrickson, who died over the weekend. She was 90, and lived alone in Gettysburg, Pa., where both she and her husband, the late Tom Hendrickson, had taught at, and retired from, Gettysburg College.

I wrote recently about grief and photojournalism; it seems that ever since life has been presenting me with ironic rejoinders to same – bombings in Boston, the deaths of two former colleagues, and the passing of familiar “old friends,” but nothing puts an exclamation point on these things like a death in the family.

There will be no obituary for her in The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or even El Pais, the papers she read daily, but Caroline was a fiercely independent woman who struck out on her own in an era when women were expected to be docile domestics. She married a man of whom her mother clearly did not approve. She attained the highest levels of professional standing in a field that was dominated by men and hostile to women.

She traveled to at least five of the seven continents, spoke at least three languages fluently, lived in pre-World War II Germany and post-WWII Europe and championed civil rights long before it was fashionable in this country.

Likewise, she believed in being physically fit – until problems with her neck got the better of her, her daily routine included a bicycle ride around the nearby Gettysburg National Military Park. She loved tennis: playing and, later, watching.

She taught me, probably more than anyone else in my family, about the importance of tolerance and acceptance of those who are different from us; she would not be cowed by the (often strident) opinions of her family and friends. My own admittedly liberal viewpoints have been greatly shaped by her world outlook.

She (and Tom) were generous to a fault – it’s fair to say that, without her support, I would not have my home here in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country.

Unfortunately, living 2,900 miles away made our visits together infrequent – I last saw her in the summer of 2011. Technology was not her forte: she did not friend me on Facebook, nor did she check her e-mail daily, much to my chagrin. Anyone in my family will tell you I’m an underachiever in the correspondence department – even more so where the U.S. Postal Service is involved. I hope she knew when she left us how much I cared for her, the dearth of letters and phone calls notwithstanding.

Caroline was not a religious woman, so I doubt she gave a lot of thought to the afterlife; I was surprised when we actually had a church funeral service for Tom. But wherever she has gone, I pray that she will meet up again with her husband, and that they will share a toast with a glass of good tequila and some Mexican dishes with lots of garlic.

Rest in Peace, Caroline.

Snapshots: Photojournalism and Grief

We newspaper photographers like to talk – about challenges of coverage, memorable mistakes, great shots that got away, about each other – and it was in the course of one of those meandering discussions the other night that I got to thinking again about the tragedies of life and how we, as journalists, are called upon to intrude upon people’s most terrible pain to ask that time-honored question, “So, how does that make you feel?”

Lance Iverson, my colleague from the San Francisco Chronicle, mentioned that perhaps his absolute least favorite part of the job was walking into the living room of a family whose child had just been killed by gun violence. We all agreed that was a miserable short straw to get, but it started an inner conversation for me: why is it that, as journalists, people – viewers, readers, editors, other reporters – expect that we will track down the survivors of some horrible conflagration and make them recount it in minute detail? And right now, before the dust has settled?

Somewhere in the back of our heads we all know why it is that we are so fascinated by death: because sooner or later, one way or another, that same fate awaits us all, every one; the only questions to be answered are how, when, and in what manner will we draw our last breath here? Sure, it's morbid, but we all know that person who wants to be the first to tell you about the famous person who just died. Because then we can all intone our regrets, while at the same time thinking, "Thank God that's not me."

 In 28 years of covering the news, I’ve been spared the horror of a Columbine, but I’ve been to plenty of traffic fatalities, fatal fires, shootings and homicide scenes and the fact is that it never really gets easier. But as time has gone on, I’ve become inured to a lot of the emotions that overwhelmed me when I got my first press card in 1985. And that’s the nub of the issue: how to make images that will move our readers when we are so jaded as to no longer feel shocked, or angry, or aggrieved?

Forget the fact that at this point media coverage of high-profile crimes is so overblown as to invite parody – it’s been 25 years since Don Henley famously lampooned the new industry’s fixation on the tragic. Or that the world is awash in images of war, terror, natural disaster and disease, on a scale unseen in human history – the same Internet that makes it possible for me to present you with this plodding mini-thesis also makes it possible to see scores of images of a nature you would never see on your television or in your daily newspaper.

Yes, I've been thinking lately that a lot of life seems to be about grief -- the loss of family, friends, pets, even inanimate objects like one's favorite TV show or a shirt that wears out from repeated wearings. It turns out, after all this talk, that I don't really have any deep insight on the subject, other than to say that it occurs to me that life has a way of beating the optimist out of us.