Bucket List: Preserving Photos

What's on your bucket list? 

A friend of mine was diagnosed with terminal cancer late last year.  She was optimistic up until about two weeks before her passing, and at that time, she only had one thing on her bucket list.  She wanted to go through pictures with her family and share what she knew about them.

The problem was that she had a huge tub of photos that weren't organized.  With her rapidly failing physical condition, it seemed to me to be an undaunting task. 

Her desire to go through this process with her children pushed me to do something similar.  For several years now, I've been taking pictures of photos with my phone and adding them to my own personal history blog.  As I uploaded the picture, I wrote about what memory I had of it.  One of the pictures was one of my mother holding me as a toddler.  It was filled with wrinkles and was definitely well worn.  There were several years that I didn't live with my mother, and for me, this picture spoke volumes because I think my mother must have carried it with her and looked at it frequently.  It wasn't the faces in the picture as much as it was the wear and tear of the picture that touched me so deeply.



With the photos uploaded, I wanted to share them with others.  I gave all of the pictures related to my sister and her family to my niece.  My sister didn't want them because she's passed on most of her photos to her kids, but this niece and her family loved looking at them.  I am happy to share them with her because they belong with her.

So think about your own bucket list.  Maybe travel isn't possible right now because of the covid-19 shutdown, but what about those things you can do at home?   Going through old photos and at least organizing them and writing a description of the people or places in them, can bring a great amount of joy during a time when so many are feeling afraid or anxious. 

While you're at it, why not snap a picture of your photo, or scan it so you can preserve it forever?  I love Google's Blogger for my own personal blog, but there are other photos that don't "fit" in the blog because of the content, and I've saved them to an external hard drive.   For me, it was a great relief to know that if I were to suffer loss through fire or flood, my photos, or at least pictures of them, were preserved.


Note:    I'm not sure where this picture was taken, but I would imagine it was in the house my parents lived in when they first married.  They were happy.  They had started a family.  My mother kept the lamps in the picture throughout her life.  They meant something to her because they bought them as a married couple.   While I may feel a tinge of sadness that their marriage ended in divorce, it makes me very happy to feel that at one time they were in love and looked forward to a future together.