Meditations on Death

© Eli Pimentel - Medjugorje - the faithful endure pain and ecstasy as they make their way to the cross © Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project © Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project View all images ↓
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  • Dates
    2024 - Ongoing
  • Author
  • Locations England, Portugal, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Austria, Uzbekistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina
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A photographic essay on grief in the wake of losing my parents in 2025.

How humans not think death is no mere pathology of the mind, or a deficiency of comportment, but an understandable disinclination to prematurely take on board the crisis of the self that results from learning death is ‘not only a permanent probability’ as we might be led to believe,[1] but an immediate reality that demands one relinquish all current and future modalities of being.

To die is to have one’s time stop, and yet all that one was and continues to be, is left in one’s wake. My parents must have known this, yet they did not seek to outpace death, already sufficiently palpable to them not to venture to regard death with self-effacing evasion, but to meet these radical crises through faith. I hope.

I have seen death this past year, as both my parents, months apart, entered into their final journeys, succumbing first into unconsciousness and, painfully, into a lingering limbo sustained by machines that mimicked their failed biological functions. We come into being through a presence bracketed by death but do all we can to forestall dying, medically staving off illness, and enriching our physical longevity.

Knowing what the whole is, and not finding oneself within it, triggers a crisis of despair (a mourning directed at a loss), a melancholy because the sufferer’s subjectivity (both mind and body) is shown to him as illusory. Acts of repetition (such as photographing) sustain the melancholy ego, ‘poor and empty,’ seeking to replace what it has lost (says Freud, 1930). The ‘compulsion to repeat’ is an instinct capable of overriding all others, even our search for pleasure. It is an impulse that explains our drive towards, and our fascination with, death.

While they lingered, insensible, I desperately went back and forth between the Dominican Republic and the rest of the world. Without intending to I found myself seeking places of solace, of worship, of peace. This record of my wanderings emphasises the tensions between presence and absence, the sacred and the mundane, light and shadow.

[1] Fairfield, Paul (2015). ‘The denial of death’ in Death: a Philosophical Inquiry. (Routledge: London and New York).

© Eli Pimentel - Medjugorje - the faithful endure pain and ecstasy as they make their way to the cross
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Medjugorje - the faithful endure pain and ecstasy as they make their way to the cross

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project
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On my way up Apparition Hill, hot and dazed, I stopped this priest to ask for directions. He said he did not speak English, but I insisted he stop to allow me to take his portrait. It turns out, like me, Padre Jose is from Dominican Republic. I explained about my father, he was also there for his. His parting words, Go with faith.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project
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Podbrdo, Medjugorje. The subjective truth is not about the individual’s relation to the objective truth in Christianity. Through faith, one has passed beyond the postulates of morality to commune with God, but through this process has learned his or her own subjective truth: the meaning of existing as a human being.

© Eli Pimentel - Chor Bakr Necropolis, Uzbekistan a site of peace and extreme joy.
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Chor Bakr Necropolis, Uzbekistan a site of peace and extreme joy.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project
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Everyday resurrections, labour and persistence in faith. Whilst in this world, we cannot take what good can be found in it for granted, but, it would seem, we are not at liberty to escape it freely.

© Eli Pimentel - Doves in Mendoza, Argentina, on their final journey.
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Doves in Mendoza, Argentina, on their final journey.

© Eli Pimentel - Fatima, Portugal. As humans, we can be perversely committed to the universal, trusting that the universal is infinite.
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Fatima, Portugal. As humans, we can be perversely committed to the universal, trusting that the universal is infinite.

© Eli Pimentel - An exuberance of flowers to match the bearer, who cheerfully hit me across the face with the blooms he later gifted me.
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An exuberance of flowers to match the bearer, who cheerfully hit me across the face with the blooms he later gifted me.

© Eli Pimentel - Lost souls. Fatima.
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Lost souls. Fatima.

© Eli Pimentel - Fatima, Portugal.
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Fatima, Portugal.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project
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Inner strength, dignity and kindness - thousands of dahlias welcome visitors at the entrance of the Bakhautdin Naqsband Mausoleum, a Sufi sanctuary near Bukhara. This image introduces life and the wonder of creation as a constant cycle of flourishing and change.

© Eli Pimentel - Image from the Meditations on Death photography project
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All the Marys. Ought we to posit death, not as a morbid obsession, but as an existential problem for the living, even for those unable to match its passion?

Meditations on Death by Eli Pimentel

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