I discovered the truth about the photograph on a Tuesday afternoon in November, sitting alone in my late mother’s house, with a magnifying glass in one hand and a cup of tea growing cold beside me.
The photograph had been in our family for as long as anyone could remember, passed down through four generations of women who had each, in their turn, placed it carefully among their most treasured possessions, and carried it with them through marriages and relocations and all the upheavalss that a century of living inevitably brings.
My mother had kept it in a cedar box on her dresser alongside her wedding ring and a lock of my father’s hair.
And when she died last spring at the age of 87, the box had passed to me along with the house and its contents, a final inheritance from a woman who had never been given to explaining the significance of the things she held dear.
I had looked at the photograph many times before that November afternoon, had held it in my hands, and studied the faces it preserved, and wondered about the woman at its center, whom family legend identified only as great great grandmother Adelaide.
I knew the basic facts of her life, as they had been passed down through the generations.
She had been born in rural Vermont in 1879, had married a farmer named Samuel Hartwell when she was 23 years old, had borne him six children over the course of 15 years, and had died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, leaving behind a grieving husband and five surviving children who had scattered across the country in the decades that followed.
She was my mother’s great grandmother, my great great grandmother, a woman separated from me by four generations and more than a century of history.
A woman whose face I knew only from this single photograph that showed her seated in a wooden chair with two infants cradled in her arms.
The babies in the photograph were twins, according to the family story, born in the spring of 1907 when Adelaide was 28 years old.
They were her third and fourth children, arriving after two daughters who had come in quick succession in the early years of her marriage.
The twins had been a surprise and a blessing, the story went.
A gift of abundance in an era when infant mortality was high, and every healthy birth was caused for celebration.
Adelaide had named them Eleanor and Edith after her own mother and her husband’s mother, honoring both sides of the family, with these new lives that seemed to promise so much hope for the future.
But as I sat in my mother’s house on that November afternoon, studying the photograph with a magnifying glass I had borrowed from her sewing basket, I began to see things I had never noticed before.
I began to see the truth that the photograph had been hiding in plain sight for more than a hundred years.
The terrible secret that Adelaide had carried with her into the grave, and that no one in our family had ever thought to question.
The two infants in Adelaide’s arms were dressed identically in long white christening gowns with delicate lace trim at the collars and cuffs.
They wore matching bonnets tied beneath their chins with satin ribbons, and their small hands were folded across their chests in poses of peaceful repose.
At first glance, they appeared to be sleeping, their eyes closed, their faces serene, their tiny bodies relaxed against their mother’s breast.
It was a beautiful image of maternal devotion, a portrait of a young mother with her newborn children.
The kind of photograph that families commissioned to celebrate the miracle of new life and to preserve the memory of those precious early days when everything seemed possible and the future stretched out before them like an unwritten book.
But when I looked more closely, when I brought the magnifying glass to bear on the details of the image, I began to see the differences between the two babies.
The infant on the left, cradled in Adelaide’s right arm, had a certain quality of presence that was unmistakable once I learned to recognize it.
Her cheeks had the soft roundness of living flesh.
Her lips were slightly parted as though she might at any moment draw breath or let out a cry.
And there was a faint blur to her fingers that suggested the subtle movements of a sleeping child.
The tiny twitches and adjustments that even the most peaceful slumber cannot entirely suppress.
She was alive.
She was real.
She was Elellanena or Edith.
I could not know which.
But she was indisputably present in that moment, warm and breathing and nestled against her mother’s body with the perfect trust of an infant who knows nothing yet of loss or grief or the cruelties of the world.
The infant on the right was different.
Her cheeks had a waxy smoothness that did not quite match the texture of living skin.
Her lips were pressed together in a line that was too perfect, too composed, too still.
Her fingers were arranged with a precision that no sleeping baby would maintain, each one positioned just so, as though someone had taken great care to place them in exactly the right attitude of peaceful rest.
And her eyes, which I had always assumed were merely closed in sleep, had upon closer inspection a quality of flatness, of absence, that made my heart clench in my chest with sudden devastating understanding.
The baby on the right was not sleeping.
The baby on the right was dead.
I sat for a long time after that realization, the magnifying glass forgotten in my lap, the photograph still held in my trembling hands.
I thought about Adelaide, about the young mother who had posed for this portrait with one living child and one dead one, who had held them both against her breast and looked into the camera with an expression I now understood was not serene contentment, but rather the numb, hollow calm of a woman in the depths of unimaginable grief.
I thought about the photographer who had arranged this scene, who had positioned the dead infant just so, who had perhaps used hidden supports or carefully placed pillows to keep the small body upright in its mother’s arms.
I thought about the customs of an era I had studied in books but never truly understood until that moment.
An era when postmortem photography was not considered morbid or macabb, but rather a final act of love, a way of preserving the image of those who had been taken too soon, a memorial that grieving families could hold and touch and weep over in the long years of absence that stretched before them.
And I thought about the family story, the story that had been passed down through four generations.
The story that spoke of twin daughters named Elellanena and Edith as though both had survived, as though both had grown up and lived full lives and contributed their own branches to the family tree.
That story, I now realized, was a lie.
It was a gentle lie, a protective lie, a lie told by people who wanted to spare their descendants the pain of knowing what had really happened in that farmhouse in Vermont in the spring of 1907.
But it was a lie nonetheless, and the photograph I held in my hands was proof of a truth that someone long ago had decided was too terrible to speak aloud.
I began my research the next morning, driven by a need to know that I could not have explained or justified to anyone who asked.
I needed to understand what had happened to Adelaide’s babies.
Needed to piece together the story that the photograph had been silently telling for more than a century.
Needed to give a name and a history to the small, still form that Adelaide had cradled so tenderly in that long ago portrait.
I searched through genealogical records and census data, through church registries and county archives, through every source I could find that might shed light on the lives and deaths of the Hartwell family of Rutland County, Vermont.
What I discovered was both simpler and more devastating than I had imagined.
The record showed that Adelaide Hartwell had indeed given birth to twins in March of 1907 and that the babies had indeed been named Elellanena and Edith.
But the records also showed that only one of those babies had survived beyond her first week of life.
Edith Hartwell, the younger twin by 7 minutes, had died on March 23rd, 1907, just 6 days after her birth.
The cause of death was listed as failure to thrive.
A catch all term that doctors of the era used for infants who simply faded away in the early days of life, unable to nurse properly or to gain the strength they needed to survive.
The photograph, I now understood, had been taken shortly after Edith’s death, perhaps on the very day of her funeral, or in the brief window of time between her passing and her burial.
It was a memorial portrait, a final image of the two sisters together, a keepsake that Adelaide could treasure for the rest of her life as proof that both her babies had existed, that both had been real and loved and mourned.
The photographer had posed the living twin beside the dead one, had arranged them in matching gowns and bonnets, had created an illusion of peaceful slumber that would allow Adelaide to look at the photograph and imagine, if only for a moment, that both her children were merely sleeping, that both might wake at any moment, and open their eyes and reach for her with tiny grasping hands.
It was a practice I had read about in my research.
this custom of post-mortem photography that had flourished in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
In an age when death came frequently and often without warning, when families had no guarantee that their loved ones would survive from one year to the next, photographs of the dead served a purpose that modern sensibilities find difficult to comprehend.
They were not meant to be morbid or ghoulish, but rather tender and commemorative, a way of holding on to those who had been lost, a physical object that could be touched and kissed and wept over when the grief became too much to bear.
Parents photographed their dead children.
Children photographed their dead parents.
Husbands and wives posed beside partners who had departed this life only hours before.
The photographs were displayed in homes carried in lockets.
passed down through generations as precious heirlooms that preserved the faces of those who might otherwise be entirely forgotten.
But what made Adelaide’s photograph different, what made it particularly heartbreaking to contemplate was the presence of the living twin beside the dead one.
Elellanar, the surviving baby, had been placed in her mother’s arms alongside the sister she would never know.
the sister who had shared her mother’s womb for nine months and had entered the world just seven minutes before her.
They had been photographed together, dressed alike, posed as mirror images of each other, so that Adelaide could have this one image of her twins, as they should have been, as she had dreamed they would be during all those months of anticipation and hope.
It was an act of love so fierce and so desperate that it took my breath away to contemplate it.
A mother’s refusal to accept that her family was incomplete, that one of her babies had been taken from her, that the future she had imagined would never come to pass.
I thought about Adelaide often in the weeks that followed.
As I continued to research her life and the lives of those she had left behind, I thought about what it must have been like for her to hold her dead baby in her arms, while the photographer adjusted his equipment and prepared his plates to sit perfectly still for the long exposure while her living daughter squirmed and fussed beside her.
to maintain the composed expression that the conventions of portrait photography demanded, while her heart was shattered into a thousand pieces.
I thought about the days and weeks and months after the photograph was taken, when Adelaide had to return to the business of living, had to care for her surviving children and her husband and the farm that demanded constant attention, had to find a way to carry on despite the weight of grief that must have pressed down upon her like a physical burden.
And I thought about Elellanena, the surviving twin, who had grown up as a single child where there should have been two, who had perhaps been told about her sister at some point, or perhaps had been kept in ignorance her entire life.
The family records showed that Elellanena Hartwell had survived to adulthood, had married a man named William Doors, in 1928, had borne three children of her own before dying in 1952 at the age of 45.
She was my greatg grandmother, I realized with a start, the woman who had been the living infant in that photograph, the one whose chest rose and fell with breath, whose tiny fingers had twitched and moved, whose presence in the image was real and vital and full of all the promise that her sister would never fulfill.
My mother had known Ellanena, had spent summers with her as a child, had listened to her stories and eaten her cooking, and absorbed the family law that Elellanena had been so fond of sharing.
But my mother had never mentioned a dead twin, had never suggested that the photograph on her dresser was anything other than a simple portrait of a mother with her two healthy babies.
Had Elellanena known the truth? Had she looked at that photograph throughout her life, and understood that the baby beside her was not sleeping, but dead, that she had entered the world with a sister who had departed it almost immediately, that she was a survivor of a loss she could not remember, and had perhaps never been told about, or had the truth been concealed from her, as it had been concealed from the rest of us, buried beneath layers of silence and euphemism, and the gentle fiction that both twins had thrived.
I found the answer to that question in a letter that had been tucked into the back of the cedar box, hidden beneath a false bottom that I had not noticed until I examined the box more carefully in the light of my new understanding.
The letter was written on paper that had yellowed with age in handwriting that I recognized from other family documents as Adelaide’s own.
It was dated November 12th, 1915, and it was addressed to my darling Elellanena to be read on your 21st birthday.
I The letter was long and rambling, filled with the kind of advice and reflection that a mother might offer to a daughter on the threshold of adulthood.
Adelaide wrote about the importance of kindness and honesty, about the value of hard work and the dangers of vanity, about the joys of motherhood and the sorrows that inevitably accompanied it.
But near the end of the letter, her tone shifted, becoming more urgent and more tender, and she began to write about the photograph.
“You will wonder perhaps about the portrait that hangs in the parlor,” Adelaide wrote.
the one that shows you and your sister Edith as infants in my arms.
You will have been told, as I instructed your father to tell you that Edith died when you were both very young, that she was taken from us by a fever before her first birthday.
This is a lie, my darling, and I am sorry for it.
The truth is that your sister died when she was only 6 days old, before you had even opened your eyes enough to see her face.
before you had the chance to know her as I knew her in those brief, precious days when I held you both and dreamed of the lives you would lead together.
” Adelaide explained that she had asked the photographer to come to the house on the day of Edith’s funeral, that she had insisted on having one portrait made of both her babies before Edith was laid in the ground.
I could not bear the thought of having no image of her, Adelaide wrote.
No proof that she had ever existed, nothing to show you when you were old enough to understand.
I wanted you to see how beautiful she was, how perfect, how much she looked like you in every way.
I wanted you to know that you were not alone in the beginning.
That you came into this world with a companion, a sister, a friend who would have loved you as I love you if only she had been given the chance.
The letter went on to describe the difficulty of that day.
The agony of holding her dead baby in her arms while pretending for the camera that everything was peaceful and serene.
Adelaide wrote about the photographers’s kindness, how he had worked quickly and efficiently, how he had posed Edith’s body with such gentle care that she almost seemed to be sleeping, how he had captured an image that Adelaide could look at without weeping.
An image that preserved the illusion of wholeness even as her heart was breaking.
I have looked at that photograph every day since it was taken, Adelaide wrote.
And every day I have thanked God for the gift of it, for the chance to see my two girls together, for the memory of those few days when I had everything I ever wanted and did not know how quickly it would be taken from me.
The letter ended with a plea that brought tears to my eyes as I read it.
Do not think of your sister with sadness, my darling, Adelaide wrote.
Think of her with love, with gratitude for the brief time she was with us.
With hope that you will meet her again someday in a place where there is no sickness, no death, no separation.
She is waiting for you, Elellanena.
As I will be waiting for you when my own time comes.
We will all be together again, the four of us, you and me and your father and little Edith.
And we will have all of eternity to share the love we were denied in this life.
Until then, keep the photograph safe.
Pass it on to your own children and grandchildren, and tell them the truth that I was too cowardly to tell you myself.
Tell them about the sister you never knew, the aunt they will never meet, the little girl who lived for only six days, but who was loved with all the ferocity that a mother’s heart can contain.
Eleanor had kept her mother’s letter, had preserved it in the cedar box that had eventually passed to my mother and then to me.
But the family story suggested that she had not followed Adelaide’s final instructions, had not told the truth about the photograph to her children and grandchildren, had chosen instead to maintain the comforting fiction that both twins had survived into childhood.
Perhaps the truth had been too painful for her to speak aloud.
Perhaps she had wanted to spare her descendants the grief that the letter had awakened in her own heart.
Perhaps she had simply decided that some secrets were better left buried, that the dead deserved their rest, and the living deserved their peace.
But now the secret was out, uncovered by a granddaughter with a magnifying glass and too much time on her hands, brought to light after more than a century of careful concealment.
I thought about what to do with this knowledge, whether to share it with my cousins and aunts and uncles, whether to add Edith’s name to the family tree with the dates of her brief life and early death, whether to finally give this forgotten child the acknowledgement she had been denied for so long.
And I thought about Adelaide, about the young mother who had loved both her babies with such desperate intensity, who had refused to let death separate them in the one image she would carry with her for the rest of her days.
The photograph still sits on my dresser now, in the same cedar box where my mother kept it, alongside the letter that Adelaide wrote to the daughter she would never see grow up.
I look at it often.
at the young woman in the wooden chair with her two babies in her arms.
At the identical christristening gowns and the matching bonnets and the small hands folded just so across tiny chests.
I look at Elellanena, the living twin, and I try to imagine the life she led, the woman she became, the children and grandchildren she produced who eventually led to me.
And I look at Edith, the dead twin, the baby who lived for only six days.
And I tried to hold her in my heart as Adelaide held her in her arms on that long ago day when grief and love became indistinguishable.
A mother posed with her twin infants in 1907.
And for more than a hundred years, everyone who looked at the photograph saw what they expected to see.
A portrait of a happy family.
A celebration of new life, a moment of peace and contentment preserved forever in silver and glass.
But the truth was darker and more tender than the surface suggested.
A story of loss and love and the fierce maternal instinct that refuses to let go even when death demands it.
Adelaide Hartwell lost her daughter Edith on a March day in 1907.
But in the photograph she commissioned, both her babies are present.
Both are beautiful.
Both are hers.
She found a way to keep them together, at least in this one image.
And she passed that image down through the generations so that someday someone would look closely enough to see the truth.
I am that someone.
And now that I know, I will not let Edith be forgotten again.
She lived for six days.
She was loved for a lifetime.
and she deserves to be remembered.
Her name was Edith Hartwell and she was real and her mother never stopped loving her, not for a single day of the 11 years that remained to her after that photograph was taken.
The image captured them together, mother and daughters, the living and the dead, united in a moment that transcended the boundary between this world and the next.
It was all Adelaide could give her lost child.
This one final portrait.
This one lasting memorial.
And it was enough.
It had to be enough.
But look closely at the photograph and you will see the truth that Adelaide tried to preserve and that time tried to erase.
You will see one baby breathing and one baby still.
One baby present and one baby gone.
One baby who would grow up to live a full life and one baby who would remain forever an infant.
You frozen at 6 days old, held in her mother’s arms for eternity.
You will see what love looks like when it refuses to accept loss.
What grief looks like when it finds a way to transcend death.
What a mother’s heart is capable of when it is broken beyond all repair and somehow continues to beat.
You will see the truth that was hiding in plain sight all along, waiting for someone to look closely enough to find it.
The photograph was never meant to be a mystery.
It was meant to be a memorial, a testament, a promise that the dead would not be forgotten.
Adelaide kept that promise for as long as she lived.
And now I will keep it for her.
Edith Hartwell, born March 17th, 1907, died March 23rd, 1907.
Beloved daughter, cherished sister, forever missed.
She was here.
She mattered.
She was loved.
And now at last she is remembered.
