ALLOW ME TO TAKE THIS PICTURE FOR YOUR FUNERAL

Friend – do you mind if I take the picture that they will use for your funeral, when you die, someday? Something in your countenance and the way you are sitting makes it, in my view, the perfect photo for a memorial service - your face, your collar and, in fact, I believe, the whole of the right side of your body, and the way it is inclined towards the light breaking through the window, creates a sense of timelessness, that you could be any person sitting in any window, from now until forever, and I would love the opportunity to raise my camera in front of me and capture it in a photograph that one day will appear bordered in a digital frame on an LCD screen in a chapel on the occasion of your death. I might venture that there is something about your aspect which seems, in this moment, many years (touch wood) before the sad day of your passing, to be both aware of and at peace with it. The smile on your face is calm and complete, present in your eyes in the same measure as your mouth - a smile which is not overmirthful. It is a smile that I believe to be safe from the risk of comically distorting your face, which - as you would agree, brother - is so common when taking a photo of someone in the grips of laughter. Were I to take this photo of you now I know that your eyes would not squint, your jaw would not sag open, and conversely you would look perfectly tasteful - with an easy wisdom and a lightness to your spirit. And let me say a word in praise of the room itself, so sparsely decorated, painted and furnished in warm tones of earth, as those rooms which we remember or dream of from childhood so often are. Your hand in the foreground, large, a touch hairy, centres in my recollection of you your warmth, your ragged edges, your flesh and blood, much as it will in those who think of you when at last your day comes. Not to mention the dark of the corner of the room, which is to you merely the remotest point from the warm afternoon outside, yet to those who, years hence, will view this photograph, should you permit me to take it, it will be a soft reminder of those unplumbable recesses of the ones we love, those depths of unknown quantity, filled with uninventoried secrets. Allow me to take this picture, friend. There will be no reason for you to regret it.