When my mother passed, I braced myself for the big things.
The house. The furniture. The bank papers, the car, all the pieces of a life that have to be sorted and signed for. Those were hard, but they were the kind of hard I expected. There were steps to follow. People to call.
Then I found the photos.
Boxes of them. Albums stacked in the hall closet, shoeboxes stuffed with loose prints, yellowed envelopes straight from the drugstore with the negatives still tucked inside. A whole carousel of slides I had no way to even look at. Decades of my parents’ lives, and now my grandparents’ lives too, all of it sitting there in front of me.
And I completely froze.
The furniture I could give away. The house, in time, I could sell.
But how do you throw away a photograph?
Every single one was a moment someone thought was worth saving. A birthday. A trip. A face. And a good number of those faces, I realized with a sinking feeling, I couldn’t even name.
People my mother knew, people who mattered to her, and there was no one left to ask.
That’s when it hit me. This was going to be the hardest thing of all.
If you’ve found yourself standing over boxes like these, unsure how you’ll ever get through them, please know you’re not alone, and there’s no rush here. Grief has its own clock, and this kind of sorting can wait until you’re ready.
When you are, I want to walk you through what finally helped me, because figuring out what to do with parents’ old photos turned out to be less about the photos and more about letting myself off the hook.