The Photograph

Ruth Ann brought in a picture and asked me to make her look like it.

That is not a remarkable request. Women bring me pictures constantly. It's usually a magazine tear or a screenshot or a photo of themselves from a wedding in 1994, and my job is to find the honest middle between what's in the picture and what's on the head.

This one was Ruth Ann herself, maybe fifty-two, standing in front of a hedge in a blue dress. Good set, good height, the kind of finish that holds through a hot afternoon.

"I can do that," I said. "Occasion?"

"My obituary."

I want to tell you I handled that gracefully.

"Are you sick?"

"No."

"Are you planning something?"

"I'm planning all of it," she said, in the voice of a woman explaining a filing system to somebody slow.

Ruth Ann was seventy-six and in excellent health and had recently attended the funeral of a friend where the family had used a photograph pulled off a refrigerator in the first hour of the worst day of their lives. Cropped from a group shot. Somebody's elbow still in it. Hair flat on one side.

She had come home from that service and decided her daughters were not going to be put through the drawer.

So she'd written the obituary herself. Picked the hymns, the readings, the funeral home, and the church ladies who were and were not to be allowed near the reception food. All she needed was a photograph where the hair was right.

I gave her the set. Her daughter took the picture in my parking lot with a phone, against the brick, because the light was better than the hedge.

Ruth Ann lived another eleven years.

She came in every single year to redo it. Same week in September, same set, same blue dress until it wore out and then a different blue dress. She was mildly put out about the whole arrangement, the way you'd be about renewing a license.

"This is getting expensive," she told me once.

"You could stop."

"I could stop being seventy-nine, too," she said. "Neither one seems to be up to me."

Eleven photographs in that folder by the end, and instructions on which one, and she'd picked the most recent every time she updated because she'd been right from the start that it ought to look like her.

I did her hair one last time at the funeral home. I'd done it every six weeks for twenty-three years and my hands knew the shape without being asked.

Her daughters found a note in the folder with the photographs. It said which hymns, which readings, which photograph, and then at the bottom, in her handwriting: Jayne did the hair, in case anyone asks.

Thirty years behind a chair, and that is the only credit line I ever got.