A picture’s worth a Thousand words…

It’s been a busy couple of months and I finally have an afternoon to myself! Waheyyyyy! Meaning that I needed an excuse to procrastinate from finishing my coursework for my Certificate in Celebrating (not the official name of the qualification but I prefer it…) Perfect excuse to write a blog and post about something that’s been running through my mind a lot recently!

11 years ago I lost my Fairy Godmother and I remember a conversation had amongst my family at the time about getting in more photos because one day people are going to miss you and wish that they had more pictures of you.

At the time I was a millennial at uni, taking 100 photos on a night out and uploading them all to Facebook. This was never going to be a problem for my loved ones! 

Fast forward a couple of years and I’d completely forgotten those conversations, decided that nobody needs pictures of everything I do, and I’m a horrible photographer anyway. I’ll take a few of the nice places I go, just for me and jump in the odd group pic, that’s plenty. 

Working with the grieving, I adore it when they show me pictures and tell me stories about their special person. But out of the five families/friendship groups I’ve met in this capacity so far, only 1 has had any photos to show me beyond the person’s twenties/early thirties/a handful of panicked photos during their illness that they admit they won’t really look at. 

Hearing 4 different groups of people say ‘they didn’t like having their photo taken much’ just breaks my heart!

I’m sure most of these people had different reasons for not having many photos. I’ve heard plenty of people refuse pictures based on a few extra lbs or how they think they look, but other reasons could be living alone and never thinking to ask people to take their pictures, perhaps they documented their family life and never got the camera out once the kids had flown the nest, or maybe like me wanted to ‘live in the moment’.

You don’t need to pore over your photos all the time if you don’t want to. But make sure you get in them, so someone else can pore over when you’re gone. 

*I’m going to write a little disclaimer here because a couple of weeks back I spent the weekend in Dublin with some friends and Diane, who took on the role of ‘tour guide’ would pull me up on this post because I said ‘no’ multiple times to her offer of photos. In my defence, one was at the edge of a windy cliff and risking my life for a picture is not for me. The second ‘no’ was walking up a windy mountain where the gale was literally trying to remove my floaty kaftan. Nobody needed that photo of me!