Caroline Catlin shares her riveting story of how photographing those with terminal illness gave her perspective about her own cancer diagnosis in the New York Times’ “What I Learned Photographing Death.”
Catlin volunteers with Soulumination, a nonprofit organization that documents moments between critically ill individuals and their families, including the end of a child’s life. As I also live in Washington State, I had heard of this remarkable organization and the unique and thoughtful service they provide. Catlin’s piece, though, also reveals the perspective of these volunteer photographers. As Catlin describes, her role is to enter a room “ready to capture the way that love honors the dying. Witnessing these small moments helps me come to terms with my own mortality.” Her experience echoes that of many who work in the medical field. She too is a kind of caregiver for these families, wielding a camera rather than a stethoscope.
This young writer and photographer describes how in October she herself became a patient, eventually being diagnosed with malignant brain cancer. Catlin highlights how, since her diagnosis, she’s bonded with the people she’s photographing in a new way, including a teenager who shared mutual baldness: “The fact that I am sick and young has helped me form new connections with the people I am photographing.”
Catlin describes photographing the birth and death of a baby who was born with a condition that wasn’t survivable. She writes with heartbreaking clarity how “[h]e was perfect, but he did not cry,” how she captured “[h]is arm…gentle across his mother’s face — I clicked the shutter to save this gesture.”
Catlin is clear on her purpose in doing this difficult work: “When I am in those rooms, I am present with the sole goal of finding the moments within grief that feel the most gentle and human.” She also has discovered moments that speak to her own confrontation with mortality, such as when a child cries over the loss of his sister, then goes on to play near her body. She recognizes the resilience that exists in this world, that her friends and family “will also continue to live on if I die too soon.”
In the end, Catlin’s revelation is that “grief is centered not in pain but in love.” This is the lesson that she shares with us, the encouragement that “in our most horrific of moments we are met with small pricks of bright light, piercing and strong.”
Writing Prompt: In this piece, Catlin expresses how her work with Soulumination gave insight into her own experience with cancer and facing mortality. If you’re a medical provider, what has your work revealed to you about your own mortality? Alternatively, think about a time you stepped into another person’s story, during a particularly challenging time, either as a friend or family member or stranger. What did you learn from walking alongside that person, listening or observing? Write for 10 minutes.