Glen McDonald - Vancouver City Coroner - 1980

 Two Coroners - One Never Smiled

Death came into my life in 1950 in Buenos Aires. I was 8 and my mother took me (on purpose) to an open casket funeral next door. The young man had run into a train with his motor scooter. His face was all in bandages. Not long after someone from across the street won the lottery. I then concluded that only neighbours died or won lotteries.

Larry Campbell - Vancouver City Coroner - 1981

 

 In 1966 an uncle (not a real one) Leo Mahdjubian called me at my office at the US Naval Advisory Group (I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy seconded as a translator), and told me, “Alexander your father kicked the bucket yesterday on the street. He was taken to hospital by a police sergeant. You have to go to the police station to sign some documents.” I did only to find out that someone else had signed the documents. This is how I discovered an older half-brother. That evening the police sergeant called me so we could meet for coffee. He handed me a large sum of money that my father was saving so he could bribe a general and send me back to my mother in Veracruz. That money paid for my father’s small funeral.

My second facing of death was when still in the navy we knew of a military coup in the works. My sailor companions and I met and we decide that if we were orders to shoot at army conscripts we would disobey the order. Luckily this never happened.

In 1972 my mother died in bed in the presence of Rosemary and me. I could not find a nearby doctor to sign the document so we relied on a veterinarian.

It was in 1962 that studying philosophy (this I did for two years) under Ramón Xirau in Mexico City College in Mexico City that Xirau told us that Epicurus (a Pre-Socratic philosopher) often told his followers that death, since it was not painful, it was something not to be feared.

 It was a few weeks mid-August 2002 that I went to visit my old friend Abraham Rogatnick in hospital. He was 86, had terminal cancer and died a few weeks later. We talked about death. He told me he was not afraid. I read him Ambrose Bierce’s Parker Adderson Philospher and his reaction was that should I point a gun at his forehead he could not predict how he would react.

 Abraham Rogatnick & Parker Adderson Philosopher

On June 9, 2025 my friend photographer Alan Jacques texted me in the morning, “Alex, dying is untidy. Thank you for being my friend.” That afternoon he died via MAID.

All the above is about the fact that the most important photograph I have ever taken nobody will ever see. My wife was lying dead on our bed and with my two daughters and granddaughters we were in the living room waiting for the funeral people to show up. I had a thought, “Alex, you are a photographer. You have to take that photograph.” And so I went upstairs and there was my dead Rosemary with our female cat, Niña, sleeping on her chest. I took the photograph. Six minutes before Rosemary died she asked, "Am I dying?" I was unable to reply.

I put all my family photographs into an exterior drive and in my computer called “Family”.  I have another called “All our cats”. Yesterday I was scrolling through the many family photographs and suddenly there was the Rosemary and cat photograph. This was only the second time I had ever seen it. It has left me “impresionado”. I called my youngest daughter Hilary. She told me, “Papi I would never want to look at that photograph.

By language English is in luck that R.I.P. matched the Latin. That is not the case in Spanish were we either write R.I.P. because it is Latin or we write or say, “Descanse en paz.”

I want to end this blog by writing that a few weeks ago the new Vancouver Drug Czar, Larry Campbell paid me a visit. In spite of his lovely suit with matching smile he confessed to me that he was a tad melancholic. I did not want to ask him since years ago when he faced many dead people as the Vancouver Coroner how that might affect his current job. I had also photographed outgoing Coroner Gen MacDonald in 1980. He did not smile in my photographs nor did I ask him to.

I question the idea of wishing people who are dead to R.I.P.  Every day with my cats on top of me I do just that on my comfortable bed. 

I just wonder.