Nature Future Conditional

The story behind the story: Age progression

This week’s Futures story is the touching tale Age progression by Susana Martinez-Conde. Susana very kindly made some time to explain what inspired the piece — as ever it pays to read the story first.

Writing Age progression

I discovered Victorian post-mortem photography around the time that I lost my second and third pregnancies. I learned that family pictures of that age were not constrained to the living, but could include the body of a dead child — for whom no other portraits might exist — surrounded by parents and siblings. Nineteenth-century daguerreotypists would go to the homes of the deceased and stage the corpses — often aided by hidden props — so that they looked alive. The illusion could be surprisingly successful.

I was fascinated to find out that post-mortem portraiture did not end with the Victorian era, but it remains extant today. Volunteer painters and photographers sometimes visit hospitals to portray stillborn babies, as well as infants who live for just a short while after birth. Such depictions can be precious to grieving parents.

In recent years, age-progression techniques — originally developed to help identify missing children long after they’ve vanished — have also comforted bereaved parents, by showing them how their children would look had they lived to become teens or young adults. Do the age-progressed photographs help parents get closure, or prevent them from moving on?

Grief is complicated, so there is no simple answer.

My own losses happened relatively early in pregnancy, so I did not get to see what my babies might have looked like. But I still wonder every now and again.

In Age progression, virtual technology helps fill the gaps in a mother’s imagination. Whether she is better or worse off for it … that’s for the reader to decide.

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