Anyone who hangs out with me knows I love taking photos. I’m often forcing the group shot. It’s annoying. My phone camera roll has over 35,000 images!1 And that’s where most of them live. Just on my phone or shared privately with the people in them. Most don’t get shared publicly. But I like having them there and knowing I can refer to them. I don’t document everything, but I do like to document. And I especially like to take a photo when special people are together.
Part of it is knowing how much I have treasured all the photos and videos I took with Mike. After he died, these were precious. They induced both comfort at seeing his face, and agony of longing for what was lost. I compiled photos and videos of our adventures to share with his family and my people. I still do this on various anniversaries. Pictures also made it easier to fight the voice questioning if any of it was real due to the memory issues I experienced (a common result from grief and especially traumatic loss). They provided grounding facts.
Photographs are an image of a moment in time.
They aren’t a memory, but they can transport us to a place and provide evidence. In a complicated loss like Mike’s death, that wasn’t always a good thing. I have pictures of Mike and I that evoke tough memories of fights, tense moments or misunderstandings. I look at these differently now with more knowledge and assumptions about what was going on. Like the day he was being secretive about using his vape again after he was so happy to quit it, or that comment about drugs that I didn’t understand, or a missed opportunity to query what was really going on that day. I have plenty of photos that I avoid sharing because of these complicated emotions.
And still, I’d rather have them then not.
While I cherish pictures of Mike, seeing myself from before he died was and can still be challenging. I struggled looking at pictures of myself from before his death. The shock and trauma and significance of his death changed me and this woman seemed unrecognisable. I judged her harshly for all she didn’t know. And I felt disconnected with that version of myself I could no longer relate to. Even seeing the both of us smiling in my profile picture agonized me. I hated the idea of taking Mike out of the frame, but I couldn’t bear looking at the two of us smiling as if everything was fine. Everything was not fine.
But that left a choice of what to replace it with… Posting a selfie from the present day of me smiling felt false, and I also worried what people would think. Would they assume an updated smiling current day profile picture meant that I was “all better”? A picture of me crying would have been more accurate, but I wasn’t about to post that photo either. I couldn’t win. After overthinking I settled for a very far away picture that a friend took of me hiking. At times, zooming out can be helpful.
In partner death, you also lose the main witness to your life.
They are the one to usually take our picture. We hope they see the best in us and want to capture snaps of moments together. After Mike died, I was alone majority of the time. There was no one there to see me, to take my photo, to witness me.
The desire for a witness and the awareness of my own mortality are consistent themes in my life. I feel the significance of treasuring every moment (and I’m working on it). Throughout my cancer diagnosis and treatment I was faced with my own mortality and thought about what I would leave behind if I died soon. Besides a well-loved 2011 Mazda 2, an unfinished book, and many incomplete crosswords, what imprint would I leave? How would people remember me? And… what picture would be used for my death announcement?
Existentialism aside, I also NEEDED pictures of myself.
I was asked for photos for various work things and got by with some quick hallway selfies. Then, more recently I needed a professional headshot as well as photos for my new website. Hallway selfies no longer cut it…
Enter good friends. One in Vancouver who saved me at the last minute and took some headshots for me. And another friend who is a photographer in Sydney2 kindly offered to take some photos of me on a recent trip there.3
The result is now I have photos of myself I feel comfortable sharing. I’m pleased to update my website with them and share some of them in this post. They’re of me in the now and feel reflective of who I am. I’m thrilled to be here.
Consider this post me giving blanket permission to use any of these photographs for my death announcement when that happens. Although I truly hope I will be older and there will be photos of me with lots more grey hair and wrinkles. But you never know.
And if you’re grieving and finding your own relationship with photos of yourself complicated, you’re not alone.
How do you feel about photographs of yourself? Has this shifted due to grief or other life altering events?
- Is this a lot? How many do you have? Yes, my cloud storage is chaotic. ↩︎
- If you’re in need of a photographer in Sydney, hit Victoria up. Or give her a follow if you love seeing the beautiful Northern Beaches of Sydney! ↩︎
- How good are friends. Truly. ↩︎
