Images that haunt

I've started going through my photo archives again. It's something that I had always done regularly - it helps me learn from my experiences and (hopefully) improve my photography - but I stopped after my father's passing. I was afraid of coming across a picture that would send me spinning back into darkness.

Earlier this week, though, I ventured back into the sequentially dated, painstakingly edited and sorted folders on my backup drive. I wasn't looking for anything specific. I simply realized that sooner or later I'll have to come face-to-face with what we'd lost. And I can't avoid the stories - literary, oral, visual or all three - that I've long used to mark my and my family's journey through this world.

As I slowly clicked through the photos from the past number of years, I noticed a recurrent theme: hospitals. We'd spent so much time visiting my father there, and since I had decided to take pictures when most other folks would have left their cameras at home, I ended up with countless visions into a journey both he and we wished had never been taken.

I find myself hovering over photos of him in his hospital bed, of our kids gathered around him, of my mother's look of concern, of his hands holding get well cards from our son, of whatever trivial-at-the-time moments I decided to grab with my lens. Maybe trivial then, but certainly not now.

It's jarring, upsetting and more than a little haunting. I want to move back the clock, or at least PhotoShop some of the images so they don't appear quite so stark. It was hard to accept his getting sick, and then sicker. It's even harder looking back at this now that he's gone.

I don't know what I'll ever do with the pictures. I don't know if I'll ever post any of them online - for now, it feels like the kind of thing that will cause others more pain than joy. I guess I'm learning the flip side of my decision to use photography to tell my and my family's story. Sometimes, the story hurts too much to share. Sometimes, you wonder if you should have even brought the camera at all.