prospect cemetery - the couples

When I found these death-photographs at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto they were an album of familiar faces and names I'd seen all my life and heard my parents and relatives mention often.

The wives look like my mother and all the other immigrant women who left Calabria with dreams for their children. The husbands have the same mustache that my dad still sports: the tie my grandfather was buried in. These are the faces of the contadini who left southern Italy after the war; who kept their religion and love of their hilltop towns secret.

The happy young couple - second row, 3rd from left - is representative of the assimilation into all things Canadian; the abandonment of the old in favor of the cold, Anglo-Saxon world of southern Ontario with its sleeveless dresses and prom-night corsages.

These are the death-photographs of men and women who wanted to be remembered as a couple: who are still together, side-by-side in their pink marble stipetti. (The thumbnail points to the larger image.)