Departures
Left: The author's mother, Marie-Carmel Adeline Lamour Chancy, on a trip to the French Alps. Morzine, France, 1960. Right: The author's grandmother, Marie-Rose Séphora Lilavois Lamour, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the early '60s.
“So what can we really do for each other except – just love each other and be each other’s witness?”
—James Baldwin, Another Country
This story begins with a photograph, as most of my memories do. This one belongs not to me but to the times, these times.
The photograph was taken in Bergamo, Italy, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the middle of the frame is a casket. To its left, about six feet away, stands a priest. To its right stands a man, at the same distance, his head down, clad in mourning black. He wears dark sunglasses and a blue surgical mask, arms clasped against his chest. In the casket between them is the body of the man’s mother, or perhaps her ashes. This is her funeral. There will be no large gathering of family or familiars. The son was not with her when she died, could not be present.
Taken by Italian photographer Piero Cruciatti, who carefully documented the ravages of Covid-19 in his native Italy, the photograph appeared the world over through Getty Images, going viral via news outlets and on Twitter. That is how I came across it. By mid-March 2020, when this photograph began to circulate, Italy was the hardest hit city in Europe. As the world watched,
