No Regrets Photo Organizing: When you lose a loved one
My mom recently passed away. We went to church on Labor Day weekend and during church, she had a seizure caused by a brain tumor we had just learned about. Exactly one week later, at almost the exact time, she left us to meet Jesus.
My mom loved pictures and I obviously inherited that gene. Over the past few years, we spent some time rediscovering our old family memories and I couldn’t be more grateful for that.
For the most part, I have only a few photo organizing regrets with my mom. Here are 4 things that I think I did right and 4 things I wish I would have done better.
4 things I did right:
Digitized all of our printed family photos. A few years ago, we tackled sorting and scanning at least 60 years of printed family memories. If you are interested in the how, you’ll find it in a previous CYP blog. Because we did this, I had a collection to very easily pull from for her funeral. We still had to decide which pictures to use, but in general, this was 1000% easier than it would have been had we not done this earlier.
Created an online family gallery. Once we scanned everything, I was able to easily share it with my family. I used an online app that even my 82-year-old mom could use on her phone, so for the past few years, we all had access to those memories and looked back at them often. The beautiful thing was that those pictures led to storytelling and I’m so grateful I got to hear those stories.
Digitized all of our home movies. As a Christmas present, I dusted off and transferred over 50 videotapes to mp4 files that my family can now access and enjoy, including our favorite one of my Mom trying to ride our jet ski back in the 80’s when we only had stand-up jet skis. Standing up wasn’t all that easy.
Created a family heritage album. Several years ago, I created a family heritage album of my mom’s side of the family. It included her story.
4 things I wish I would have done:
Finished scanning the albums. I did what I constantly warn my clients not to do, I put a few of the family albums aside to ‘deal with’ later. On the Sunday that my mom had the seizure, I had planned to work on that project. It had been on my mind for a really long time, but I just hadn’t done it. As a result, I found myself sitting on the floor last week combing through those albums for pictures that I really wanted to include in my mom’s celebration.
Taken more video. I wish I had taken more video of her later in life telling stories or just laughing. Video is super powerful. I can’t even explain how it would feel to see and hear her right now, even on a screen.
Taken more pictures of just her and I. Because most of the time I’m the one taking pictures, I don’t have that many pictures of just my mom and I. I wish I had more.
Captured more stories. As my mom and I looked through photos these past few years, stories would come up. As I’m working through her loss, I regret not writing those down.
We can’t get them back, but the memories of our loved ones can live on.
My mom spent her last few days in the Dougherty Hospice House in Sioux Falls, SD. It had beautiful gardens and in one of those gardens there was a stone that said:
‘When someone you love becomes a memory, that memory becomes a treasure.’
We have countless treasures of my Mom and for this I’m so grateful.
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Holly Corbid is the Founder/Owner of Capture Your Photos, where we help you to organize, preserve, and share your lifetime of memories. Helping you touch hearts with your photos is our passion. We specialize in digital photo organization and work remotely with clients all over the country.
Holly is also the creator of The Photo Organizing Blueprint, an online course that provides a step-by-step guide to organizing your photos.
Find us at www.captureyourphotos.com or contact us here.