Family photos and videos are a funny thing. Other than the dozen or so you might have framed and hung on a wall or sitting on a desk, the majority of your family pictures are probably stored in photo albums, cardboard boxes, or hard drives. It’s nice to know that they’re there, so you can relive those memories at some later time in life. The best time to reminisce with your photos is during family get-togethers, reunions, or holidays. Weddings are a pretty good excuse for pulling out the photo albums or putting together slideshows to (usually) embarrass the newlyweds. The saddest, most emotional time to photographically stroll down memory lane is after a death in the family.
I know because my 92-year-old father passed away a little over a week ago—depriving the world of one more quiet, noble WWII vet. I, along with my sisters and our collective children, went through many hundreds of old photographs—some dating back to the late 1930s—scanning the best ones as fast as we could. (Funerals, it turns out, are the ultimate deadline.) Some of the images we found were funny, such as the one taken at my dad’s 80th birthday party showing Dad with a vexed look on his face as his four children are yucking it up behind him. Others triggered an unanticipated avalanche of emotions, as did the photo of Mom and Dad dancing at their 25th wedding anniversary, not long before my grandmother (my dad’s mom) died from a heart attack at a table not far from the dance floor. My mom died of cancer 24 years ago, so that photo was a three-in-one kicker in the emotional gut. (It’s funny how looking at photos of dead relatives whom you never met, like my great-grandmother, for instance, don’t affect you as do pictures of those you knew and loved who have passed on, as is the case with my older brother who passed away ten years ago.) Fortunately for me, one of my nieces took on the responsibility of editing and combining the collected images in one incredibly beautiful and moving slide show that ran on a couple of monitors during the visitation at the funeral home...
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