'Death Is So Final': An Intimate Portrait of Loss

By Jeff Severns Guntzel
Published on July 27, 2009
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Raw. Intimate. Painful. Universal. That’s my setup for this potent and stunning portrait of a man who has just lost his wife of 63 years. It’s the work of photographer Maisie Crow, who deserves a truckload of awards for this piece. It’s part of an online documentary project called Soul of Athens.

“Death is so final,” the widower Tom Rose says. “It’s like turning off a light switch. And your mind is going a mile a minute…hoping…but that’s where reality sets in again that she’s gone.” And then: “There’s a harvest time for everything in the world. When an orange gets ripe you either eat it or it rots … and a human life is the same way. You have to learn to manage and take care of everything you have or you don’t have anything.”

Don’t miss this short film, and don’t rush into it without something to dry your eyes.

(Thanks, A Photo Editor.)

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