Something I’ve noticed, when looking up the biographies of actors who are in movies or TV shows I’m researching, is that you can instantly tell whether an older actor has died by their profile picture. If their profile picture is often them looking old, they’re still alive. If they look young, they’ve died. This can be really fast, too. I confirmed that Angela Lansbury had died on the day I heard the news by going to her Wikipedia page and seeing that her profile pictures was of her when she was twenty five.

This makes a certain amount of sense, I think. So long as a person is alive, what they look like right now (for which what they looked like within the last few years will suffice) is what’s most important. But once they die, it makes sense that what was most characteristically them is what’s most important. But that does raise a question as to what is most characteristically that person. In Angela Lansbury’s case, her picture at twenty five certainly is more beautiful, in the sense of having smoother skin and looking far more fertile, than her at fifty nine (the age she was when Murder, She Wrote first aired). I’m not sure that she looked better (if sex appeal is not the sole criteria of beauty) at twenty five, and I think she was far more recognizable at fifty nine.

There are broader philosophical questions that this raises, of course, which the sort of people who choose profile pictures are probably not interested in, but it is curious to ask what picture is most representative of a person’s whole life. Naively one might answer them at the end of it, however old or young that was, because that is the summation of it. That’s not really true, though. Life has phases, and as we age we leave behind phases. If we lived well, we leave them behind completed, but if we survive long enough we will inevitably leave them behind. And then at some point we’re done with all of our phases and leave this life behind entirely. This is the point of memento mori: to remember that we’re in the prologue to life, not in the real story. It is not a tragedy that we leave phases of our life behind because we were only ever getting them ready for eternity. It would be a tragedy to prepare without end and never truly live with what has been prepared. (What this consummation in eternity of what is merely prepared in time will look like we cannot imagine, of course, since all we can imagine comes from our experience and this is unlike our experience.) But to return to the main subject: perhaps, then, the picture which most represents a person is a picture of them at the height of their powers.

It’s not a very practical question for people who do not select profile pictures for the dead, but it is none the less an interesting question.