Freud wrote that the mourning period is a process in which the subject learns that his or her loved one is now gone forever. In order to survive and heal, the person must direct his or her attention towards someone or something else. Substitutive objects, such as belongings of the deceased, or an image of the deceased, can help ease the grieving process (quoted in de Duve 123). Due to its indexical nature, a photographic image may be more useful than a drawing or a painting. Moreover, the indexicality of the photograph causes a mourning process to occur with every image. More specifically, as Barthes suggests with the “that-has-been,” the viewer is always aware that the subject or the object of the image once existed in a certain time and place, but it does not exist in the same way at the time of viewing the photograph. The temporal death of photography brings awareness to both the mortality of the content of the photograph, and a sense of mortality to the viewer of the image. Whether a post-mortem photograph or not, the viewer is always engaged in a process of mourning. As Susan Sontag writes: “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability” (15). In short, the mourning process of the photograph facilitates the healing process of grieving (de Duve 123). Perhaps photographic temporal death encourages healing by provoking contemplation on the impermanence of life and aids with the acceptance of the loss of death.