Facing Death

What if for every murder victim, we cleared a wall?

by Duane Swierczynski

Last week I wrote about murders hitting home. Little did I know that a few days after that issue appeared, I'd be attending a funeral.

She was 84 years old when she died, and a great-grandmother many times over. She wasn't a murder victim, but her death felt just as abrupt: complications from surgery, followed by stroke, coma and then nothing.

We were driving to visit her Friday morning, about five minutes away from the hospital, when we heard the news.

A funeral service is nothing like the life that precedes it. Instead of a frenzy of tasks and goals, there's really nothing to do but sit there and meditate. You can pray. You can catch up with relatives you haven't seen in years. You can admire the floral arrangements. You can excuse yourself and smoke outside. You can hold someone's hand. You can eat a mint. Somebody always has mints.

Or you can look at photos taken throughout the deceased's life, affixed to a giant poster board. What you see is a life in short, random bursts, usually not arranged chronologically. The effect is a little surreal.

There she is, next to her coal-miner husband — a strapping guy who could knock you on your ass with one punch. She looks impossibly young.

There she is from five years ago. As you remember her.

There she is, back in time again, posing on the back porch of their wooden-frame house, built in the section of town for coal miners' families. The girl in that photo doesn't know she'll spend 63 years in that house, raising generations.

There are her daughters. In real life, they're standing across the room, surrounded by their own children and grandchildren. But in the photo, they're preschoolers. The color in the photo is almost faded away.

There are wedding shots, with everyone meticulously arranged. Holiday shots, where nobody is.

There's a shot of her wearing pearls, gloves and a summer dress. Nobody can remember the occasion, but from the smile on her face, it's clear she's happy to be going.

All of which to say is that you're suddenly face to face with someone's entire life just as it has slipped away. You may not know her as well as everyone else in the room, but you can't help but be touched. All because of two dozen photographs, attached to a piece of poster board with glue and ribbons.

What if we did this, citywide?

Forget the murals. They're pretty and everything, but now they're just an all-too-familiar part of the landscape, and too easily ignored.

What if for every murder victim, we cleared a wall? And we put up photographs — random bursts from their lives.

As if to say: This is what was stolen.

Four hundred deaths per year, 400 walls. More than just their faces looking back at us. Their entire lives.

None of those lives would span 84 years.

Maybe it's a crazy idea. But maybe this would remind us that too many Philad-elphians are attending more wakes than they should.

New on the Masthead

Huckabay comes to us from The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va. (Note to copy: You'll fix that if I botched it up, right?) She actually moved here without a full-time gig because she loved this town so much.

"It's a big, dirty, diverse, historic, lovable place I'm glad to call home, despite the odoriferous homeless guy who calls my apartment lobby his second home," says Huckabay. "Other fun facts: I have a cat named Don Cheadle; I love inspirational football movies while hating actual football; and I'm trying to let go of my obsession with the en dash, since City Paper doesn't use it."

The only problem is, we already have a copy editor named "Carolyn" on staff — Carolyn Wyman. So sorry, Carolyn II; looks like you're going to be "Huckabay" for the foreseeable future.

But don't sweat the last name thing too much, Huckabay. Same thing happened to Hickey, and look where it got him.

(duane@citypaper.net)