FRED FIRST: Moving Pictures And The High Cost of Letting Them Go

Tossing family photos is perhaps the most exhausting single task of this entire move, which is why I have put it off until near the end.

When mom passed, two years ago today, we began the process of disassembling her assisted living apartment. This created a moderate volume of flotsam that was easy to toss—much of it accumulated as the result of her “depression-era frugality” and consisting of “might need it someday” items like straws and sugar packets from years of fast foods.

What has been much harder to decide is the fate of the three large boxes of her personal memories tucked back in a closet of every place she has ever lived. This included many hundreds of photographs from the long span of her life.

She would remember details, and could have (and would gladly have) told me the story behind every one of them. Now they are anonymous monochrome images mostly of strangers and distant relatives, long gone.

Still, I am compelled to examine them, one by one, just in case a photo in twenty might spark a story out of my own history; but almost all go into the black trash bag, and it grieves me not a little.

It is our own persistent flotsam, too, that must go. Report cards from our two grown kids’ early years; polaroid snaps of a lifetime of pets; annual grade school pix, and decades of roll film negatives with not one but TWO of each mostly low-quality shot, making the culling all the move difficult.

So, mom, children, pets…forgive me. I am not enjoying this at all. Please know I hold each piece briefly in my heart before letting them go, and am thankful we have had those places, horses, dogs and cats, wildflowers and ferns, neighbors and schoolmates, good friends and colleagues, vacations, graduations, weddings and baby showers in our shared lives.

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Betty Jean Dillon First | September 15, 1925 – July 13, 2022

Mom, if you were still with us, you’d turn 99 in September. And maybe we’d have arranged to have you join us in Columbia, just down the hall, in assisted living. Honestly though, I cannot make myself consider any logistics more complicated than what we already have facing us. But we would have made it work.

As deeply sad as it makes me to remember those few final weeks of ill health that punctuated the end of your long, healthy and active life, I still remember one final image that I will not toss. When our children find it among our to-be-pitched assortment of memories, they will not know the story unless I tell it.

This image is not the story, but prompts me to recall from this sterile space:

It was June 1, 2022. We had been called at 3 a.m. by the hospital to come immediately. Things had gone south with the “simple procedure”, and the situation was grave.

We ran stop lights in the dark, being alone on the roads at that hour, and made the 45 minute trip from Floyd in 35. We hurried into the elevator to find the second floor critical care unit we were told to find.

As we turned the corner, there at the far end of the corridor in the room pictured here, five medical personnel were huddled around my mother’s bed, leaning over her. We feared the worst.

They seemed to be trying to hear what she was saying. Was she telling them something important? We walked even faster to get to her in time.

But suddenly, just before reaching the room, we were startled when the docs, techs and nurses straightened, throwing their masked heads back, laughing.

She had been telling them a joke.

And life goes on.

I have to sort one more box filled with maybe 20 pounds of photographs, birthday cards and fat-baby pictures. I do not enjoy being the heavy, but know every bit I reluctantly toss is that much less for our kids to deal with when it is their time to do this hard thing.

We will have saved back a small plastic bin with sufficient stories from the best shots of people, places and pets—like our last full-time dog, Gandy, that mom loved as much as we did. We used to say she spent weekends with us to visit our pets, and she didn’t deny it.

So maybe some day, if we are given enough time, I will drag out our box of keepers and tell stories of each of them to myself one more time; and quite possibly, to any surviving readers willing to hear them.

Mom, I don’t need pictures to see and hear you, and not a day passes that you are not missed. See you soon.

– Fred First is an author, naturalist, photographer watching Nature under siege since the first Earth Day. Cautiously hopeful. Writing to think it through. Thanks for joining me. Subscribe to My Substack HERE

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