Family Photo Albums

Something interesting about family photo albums. They can be at least as much a barometer of how you've changed as they can be of how your family and your world has changed.

I remember, as a kid, looking through family photo albums. It was always an interesting experience. Frequently it was a fun experience - probably because none of my family ever really delighted in capturing awkward or mortifyingly embarrassing moments. We really only had the photo albums of our immediate family (the ones full of pictures taken only since my father and mother had met and become serious). Yes, there were pictures of more extended family, but they were all in the context of family gatherings. As such, most of the people pictured were all alive; most still rather healthy. And, as a kid, most of the memories were still relatively fresh.

Now, I look through family albums and things are a bit different. The older generations of relatives have died off, so their albums are now ours. Even of my own, small family, there's death in the pages. I see cherished pets long gone. I see youth well past. I feel the lack of wholeness of the remaining "family". At this point, it's just my mother, my grandmother - who, thanks to strokes and alzheimers, isn't "all there" any more - and me. My dad's recently gone. My mom's dad is a couple years shy of two decades gone. My dad's dad is 28 years gone. I never knew my real grandmother, but the woman I knew as "Grandma Jones" has been gone for quite some time, as well (I saw to the dispersal of her ashes on a trip to England in 2000).

I've inherited the photo albums that my parents inherited as their families died. I don't know that those pictures will have a similar effect on me as I didn't really know any of the people in those pictures. The ones I did know in those pictures, I never knew as they were in those pictures. There's a sense of detached "history", but no real sense of loss.

I look at my own photos I've taken since leaving home, twenty-two years ago. There's not a lot of them and few actually document my life or activities. Mostly, they're of inconsequential things and little innate context. Lots of photos of pets. A number of photos of Donna. Very little in the ways of documentation of experiences, however. They're mostly "throwaways" for all the "content" they have.

And, in the end, none of it matters. The cargo of photos won't be passed on when I'm gone. No one to entrust them to - certainly no one that shares any of the memories my parents documented and no real memories captured in the ones I took to be shared by anyone that might pick through the remains. I suppose what it's collectively good at documenting is how ever-smaller family units eventurlly perish.

This scanning/archiving exercise is brutal. It's taking me forever to muster and maintain the energy to do it, and I'm only 200 photos in on a multi-thousand photo exercise. I'm hoping it gets easier as I expand out into memories and times and people that were not directly part of my experience. I'm hoping the lack of attachment to the faces of strangers makes it more an exercise in history and less an exercise in loss.

Ugh.