On my birthday, fully vaccinated, I went to the museum.

It wasn’t my first pandemic museum visit, but it was my first train ride in over a year; my first overpriced / mediocre museum sandwich since January of 2020; perhaps my fist solo walk in Boston, despite having lived here for a few years long ago.

I went through the museum like an exposed nerve–all eyes and feelings.

The current exhibition of photography at the MFA is by Elsa Dorfman, a beloved local photographer who died last year. She was, generally, a large-format portrait photographer, known for her work with a massive Polaroid camera. On display were her self-portraits, taken mostly on her birthdays, a stunningly defiant gesture of appearing happy and content, year after year, despite the passage of time.

The portrait from her 60th birthday stopped me in my tracks, awestruck. The handwritten caption, at the bottom: “I am 60; Allen is dead.”

In this photograph, Dorfman looks blankly at the camera, nude. She holds a birthday bouquet of sunflowers; some balloons drift off the top of the frame. The nudity is not coy or “artistic.” She is simply not wearing clothes, standing in front of the camera.

The gallery conversation was not favorable. 60 year old women are not allowed to be naked. It makes people uncomfortable.

But, oh, my heart, isn’t that what grief is? Being forever out of place, always wrong for the context, always over-exposed. Naked in the art museum, vulnerable, with your sad balloons.