THE PHOTO
“When I pointed my lens at him, he was 46 and had just sat down to breakfast….”
When my father died, in the spring of 2020, I searched my entire apartment for this picture. I went through everything—photo albums, boxes of old correspondence, the drawer where I keep my almost-never-worn jewelry—but I couldn’t find it. I had plenty of other photos of my father, but this was the one my heart wanted, and it felt like another loss not to be able to look at it, to make it part of his remembrance.
I took this picture when I was 16 and going through a photography phase. I remember sitting at the end of our long kitchen table, and hearing the camera shutter click. It was an old-school camera that had a thick lens and used real film. (I am always privately pretentious: When I decided to be a writer at the age of 10, I began a novel about a war-time orphan. I knew nothing about war, but thought it was a necessary part of serious writing, the kind I aspired to. It was the same with photography: To be serious, I thought, you had to own gear and know your way around a darkroom. The novel writing stuck, the photography did not.)
My father was a lawyer with a side hustle in real-estate investment. When I pointed my lens at him, he was 46 and had just sat down to breakfast, wearing the tartan robe he wore my entire childhood. He’s not smiling, because he didn’t suffer fools and because he had a meal to eat, and to him, eating was serious business. But he’s tolerating me, because he loves me. He is fully himself here: genial but terse, no nonsense, a bit intimidating. People said he looked like Tony Soprano, but his toughness was external only. He was always ready to chortle at a joke, help a friend who’d hit hard times, or grab the keys to drive us kids wherever we needed to go.
The setting is fully him, too. Growing up, I lived in four houses, and this was the fourth. It was his dream house, planned and worked toward for his entire adulthood. My parents grew up with the notion that if you earned advanced degrees and worked hard, you'd become rich and therefore have a great life. This 1980s house—with cathedral ceilings, a pool out back, a batting cage in the basement—embodied that dream. Unfortunately, the recession hit not long after we moved in, and my father lost a lot of money in an investment. The dream house, and life, became stressful, and we were in that house only a little while.
I found the photo in a book, six months ago, and felt great relief to have it in my hands. I was raised by parents who disliked knickknacks, kept no sentimental items, and loved nothing more than to throw things away. For better and for worse, I am more or less the same. I’ve recycled my children’s artwork, and mementos from my own youth. I’ve learned, though, that loss teaches us which objects have meaning in our hearts. We can, after all, only lose so much.
My dad had dementia for the last several years of his life: a personal, more wounding recession. The father I loved faded and became foggy, and in many ways no longer existed. This photo isn’t in great shape, and it’s not a great image, technically speaking. But it was what I wanted when we lost him for good.
—Ann Napolitano
Ann Napolitano’s fourth novel, Hello Beautiful (Dial Press), was an instant New York Times bestseller and the 100th Oprah’s Book Club pick. She is also the author of A Good Hard Look, Within Arm’s Reach and Dear Edward, on which the Apple TV+ series of the same name is based.