Baby Pictures

The Victorian baby decked out in pearls stares from the front of a pendant. Her mother memorialized her with a painting and a lock of her daughter’s hair placed inside the locket. She remains forever frozen in babyhood. The back of the locket displays the initials of the child and the date 1866. In the mid-nineteenth-century one out of three infants across the world died before the age of one and left behind grieving parents.

I didn’t hire an artist to paint my daughter Alix’s portrait. Alix survived infancy and lived until age twenty-five when she died prematurely as a result of her bipolar disorder. I placed a photo of Alix inside a locket to remember her as an infant when she still had her whole life ahead of her. Alix didn’t foresee her psychiatric hospitalizations and death to come.

Do you have paintings or photos of lost loved ones? Do they provide comfort?