Melissa Barker-Simpson

Secrets never stay buried for long. Sometimes they die unnoticed. What is lost isn’t known, so how can you find it? My mother must have lived by that code, because the skeleton’s in her closet were hollywood style. Her death didn’t take me by surprise, she had cancer for a while and the second relapse spread, treatment was limited.

Death, knowing it’s coming is never quite the preparation of going through the ‘stuff’ that is long forgotten. Here I sat in the attic a month after the funeral, looking through a box of documents and pictures not believing what I was seeing. A picture of me, but it wasn’t me because I was in the picture too. At first I thought it was double exposure on the first picture, it was taken in the 70’s. Camera and film then are not quite the same as in our digital age. The…