My uncle passed away — I’m scanning his memories

I must be a masochist, but I just watched a video of a woman with Alzheimer’s recognizing her daughter and I got weepy.

One week ago, I got a Whatsapp message from my mother telling me that my great uncle had died. His heart had stopped. He was gone.

My uncle’s name was Alevtin Godin, but to me, he was Dyadya Alik. He had Alzheimer’s too and, for the past few years, I watched his memory slip away.

Is there one word that describes cruel irony?

Dyadya Alik was a memory maker. He was our family’s designated photographer for the better part of a century. If it wasn’t for him, we would have barely any evidence of our existence. If there is a God, He must have a dark sense of humor to take the memories of a man who wanted to capture them through photography. A man who also lost his sight in the last year of his life. A wretched turn of events.

Alik was 86. Almost 30 years ago, he and his wife Anya left Russia only a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union for a life of unknowns in Brooklyn. They moved into an apartment on Cropsey in Bensonhurst, followed by one on Avenue P, where Anya still resides. Before the days of Uber, Alik drove a livery cab in the city. In his belongings, I found a handful of city maps from the 90s along with notebooks containing driving directions in his handwriting. “Make a right, then straight, then a right two blocks down.”

I also found about a dozen boxes of 35mm slides, countless negatives, and developed photos spanning decades.

Mourning is a strange thing. I’ve been lucky up to this point not to have experienced much loss; nobody that was very close to me — no one of whom I have many memories has left me, until Alik. I’ve been helping Anya manage funerary arrangements; something I’d never done before. I realized that much of what happens after someone dies is a mix of paperwork, silence, and lulls.

Have you ever embraced someone who had lost their spouse, while someone next to you ordered a pizza on the phone to make sure everyone was fed? What a bizarre experience.

Maybe I’m not good at mourning, or I’ve found my way of doing it, but I don’t really know how to be contemplative for long periods of time. A couple of days later, I called Anya and asked if I could take the boxes of slides home with me, to make them into…something? She said yes without hesitation, adding that she never bothered with them anyway.

The next day, ahead of our visit to the funeral home, I collected the boxes in a backpack, bringing them to my apartment by way of the MTA later that evening.

Is it weird to be grateful for express delivery?

Within three days, I had a light table, a dust blower, and a scanner on my desk. I’ve been going through the slides and numbering the boxes to figure out what’s where. It also turns out that my mother and grandfather in Toronto had boxes of slides that Alik shot as well. Many of them are orphan slides from rolls that I now have in my possession. A few platitudes via Whatsapp (and a PayPal money transfer) and my sister had them in the mail, heading my way.

I should have all of the slides together in a few days, but I’ve been scanning the ones I already have in the meantime. You can see a sample in the hero image for this blog post.

It’s a slow process. The flatbed scanner is popular among film photographers but only takes four slides at a time. Each one has to be air blown to remove loose dust. Then, I color correct each one in the scanning software and use infrared scanning to remove any remaining dust and scratches. Many of the slides are from the 50s and 60s, so as you can imagine, they’re not in the best condition.

I’ve been having a conversation with myself. I ask who is this even for, and I don’t have a good answer. I half-believe that mourning is self-serving. Regardless of the religious dogma that you hold true, mourning is personal — it’s about your loss, your feelings. You decide what to do with it. You can fill the void with tears or laughter. You can suppress it all. You can keep busy.

I chose to scan some negatives and write a blog post. Who are these scans for? Well, they’re for me. Then they’re for my family.

There are more than a few parallels between my uncle and me. He was a man of few words, but clearly expressed himself through photography. I haven’t found any evidence that he pursued it as an art. If anything, he did it as a duty. A sentinel, camera in hand, ready to record a family get-together or milestone in someone’s life. So that we can all remember.

I hate that he forgot. I hate that it took me until after he was gone to pick up these boxes of slides and turn them into something. A book? I don’t know. I wish he could see them. Would he like what I’ve done?

Anya never bothered with the slides. “It was always Alik’s passion, never mine.” So, they sat in a hallway cabinet, behind photo albums and an empty box that once held a statue of a caged bird.

I miss my uncle.

I don’t know what will become of these slides. But digitalization is a form of preservation. No matter what happens to the slides (though I’m going to protect them), the internet is forever. I want to share all of these photos with my family. I want to print them in a book or post them on my blog. I want to see what he was like when he was young, and what my family was like. The clothes they wore, the things they ate, the times he thought were worth remembering.

I want to honor him and connect with him in the one way I know how: through the recording and sharing of memories.

The scanner is humming, ready for the next load of slides.

Alevtin Godin. June 23, 1934 - April 9, 2021