The Smallest Funerals

The saddest moments of my childhood weren’t the dramatic ones. They were quiet: finding a dead bird on the grass outside my grandparents’ house, or a rabbit lying still at the side of the road. Some of them looked completely untouched, as if they’d simply stopped. I’d crouch down and poke at them, they wouldn’t move, and something in my chest would come apart. I’d start crying and think about their families—which even at seven I knew was a strange thing to think, but I couldn’t help it.

Russian photographer Maria Ionova-Gribina seems to understand exactly that feeling. She gathers wildflowers, berries, blades of grass, and builds elaborate little graves around the bodies of small dead animals—mice, birds, hedgehogs. Then she photographs them. The results are so carefully arranged, so unexpectedly generous in their attention, that they loop all the way back from sadness into something close to peace.

I looked at the series for longer than I expected to. There’s a tenderness there that doesn’t perform grief—it just practices it, quietly, with whatever was growing nearby.