Every Photo Tells A Story

...and why looking at them can be so damn hard

I’ve been putting off writing this post. You see it’s going to be all about photographs, and I know how triggering looking at these has sometimes been for me.

The photo above is one of my favourites of us all. It was taken by Dom’s friend who was doing a degree in photography. I was excited, because I’d never actually had any ‘professional’ family photos taken, but of course my children thought it was all a bit contrived which resulted in much hilarity, including this moment when they were supposed to be looking lovingly at me, but instead they pretended, for comic effect, that I’d just said something hilarious. They made me genuinely smile at the time and looking at it still does. But it’s taken a while.

If you’ve not been through traumatic loss, (and I’d say that, in addition to the sudden unexpected loss of anyone you love, any death of a child, however anticipated is traumatic) then you probably won’t be familiar with the feeling of dread you experience opening up old albums and revisiting the living, breathing person who is no longer here.

After he died, I forced myself to look back at old albums containing the photos of Dom (and his siblings) growing up over the years. Prior to this I’d prided myself on how well I had curated these images, in fact I’d made two books for each of my children, one for myself and one for them. In my mind’s eye they would be able to keep an album in their homes, to show to their own children at some point. And, at the same time, I would retain albums of treasured photos of my children’s own childhoods to enjoy looking back on in my ‘later’ years.

This, like so many of my plans, got blown up when Dom took his life. Instead of looking back and smiling nostalgically at those memories forever caught on camera, I found myself looking for ‘clues’ as to why Dom’s life had all ended so badly. The photos of his ‘ear-to -ear’ smiles in his young years now cut like a knife (why had he become so unhappy in the end?) and photos of an occasionally serious teenager just led me down the rabbit hole of brutally cross-examining myself over everything that I must have done ‘wrong’ as his mum.

And yet I still, albeit tentatively at first, returned to looking at those albums.

I know that for many parents who have lost their child to suicide it takes a long time to look at photos of them and I understand that. I wonder now if I was challenging myself to begin the process of being able to reconnect with what had been formerly happy memories. If this is to be done, I think I was saying to myself, let’s begin now. Albeit there were flames to walk through first, something told me that finding a way back to a feeling of gratitude for those times was the only real way back from this tragedy.

There was another aspect to it though. In the world into which I had been thrown it felt as if everything was in free-fall, and that so much of what I had been ‘building’ had been, in one stroke, taken away. Having ‘lost’ my own parents relatively young (one to cancer, the other to the slow death of dementia) as well as being left reeling by my husband’s ending of our 17-year marriage, I had put considerable effort into this reconstruction of my ‘family.’ Dom’s suicide seemed to make a mockery of looking back on treasured photos from this ‘next’ stage of life which I’d embarked on, making me question if I’d really made such a ‘success’ of being a single parent to my three teenagers. This felt like another layer of loss, which was SO unfair.

Fueled by this latest injustice I adamantly refused to accept the negative messaging my brain was intent on sending me. Bullishly (possibly) and desperately (definitely) I put together a collection of my favourite photos of Dom from his teenage years onwards. In some he was on his own or with his siblings, some we were all together and in a few now precious ones he was just with me, and I had it printed as a photobook.

At that point I wanted to put it ALL in, so I didn’t shy away from including a final painful shot of Dom and our dog Ollie which I’d taken when we met up in a park in lockdown less than two weeks before he died. He didn’t look well in the photo, and I knew he was struggling but felt helpless, because our following Covid rules made this kind of meet-up the only way I could support him. But that’s another post.

I called this book: ‘Time With Dom’ and kept it by my bedside, and looking at those photos became just that, a chance to ‘be’ with my son again. Apart from those last photos they were all incredibly happy ones. I think I was trying to ‘train’ my brain, to remind myself that, although Dom went through periods of real lows (times in which it felt as if I was walking through the anguish with him) when he was feeling okay, like his sister and brother, he brought such joy and fun into my life. Primarily this book was my evidence that I had not failed, because it showed that my son had been happy for much of his life.

Now I know where the ‘pain-points’ are I take much greater care of myself and choose not to look back on those final shots of my son. I am still a curator of photos though and make a point of ‘keeping’ Dom in the family photo books which I continue to put together each year. I organise these chronologically, marking month by month the meaningful times I have spent with family and friends, people who have shared moments of such happiness with me and for whom I feel very grateful. Dom always gets his own page, at the very back, a reminder that he will still be here with us as we move into the next year. Last year I created a montage, so he appeared side by side with me, with an old picture of him hugging a tree and a recent one of me (and my new puppy who Dom never met) by the same tree-sculpture which I regularly return to now.

Of course, it’s undeniable that suddenly seeing photos of a child who has died can sometimes catch us off guard, and I’d be lying if I said that I always greet old Facebook ‘memories’ which arrive, unannounced, onto my screen, with unmitigated joy. These ‘reminders’ of our ‘normal’ past can be incredibly painful. But, like so much around our traumatic loss, I think we can use the agency we still have to promote our healing. I refuse to allow photos to feel like the enemy, to painfully stab me and render me miserable. I want them, instead, to lead me back to the love I will always feel for my son.

The final photo I’m sharing is one taken on a New Year’s Day Walk. Dom and his siblings had probably had enough of my stopping to take photos of them at this point. Being silly was a favourite technique they’d developed to discourage me from doing this and I think it’s fair to say they’d perfected it here. I find myself laughing out loud when I look at the poses they struck so successfully to stop me clicking.

If I’d known back then, when Dom first died, that looking at this photo could bring me such unalloyed pleasure, I would have been genuinely surprised. I am so immensely glad that I have photos like this, to remind myself of these treasured moments. It’s a huge relief that I’m now able to reconnect with the ‘joy’ of these times without the feelings of heaviness at losing Dom inserting a dark cloud into the frame.

It’s worth remembering that we all have narratives in our head, but that these aren’t necessarily reliable ones and if we’re not careful, the experience of losing our child to suicide can end up with our ‘telling tales’ on ourselves. Allowing unhelpful thoughts of where we (think we) might have failed as parents to run riot just serves to make this thing a whole lot harder to bear.

Yes, photos often do tell a story. But I’m coming to realise that the tragedy and pain of losing Dom is contained in only one of the books that sit on my shelf. And I’ve decided that those old photos aren’t meant to cause me pain, they are there to remind me to reconnect with the fun of the moments that I photographed, because that takes me back to really happy times.

So this is the story I choose now; the one where I get to remember the sheer delight that my darling son brought to my life in the first place.