Please stop avoiding photos (a plea)

My mom is notorious in our family for ducking out of photos, putting her hand up to block the lens, etc. I know why she does it. She’s uncomfortable in her body, hates the way she looks in photos. I get it.

We just found out she has terminal cancer.

Now, looking through our libraries, I have barely any photos of her. I’m lucky I have time to try to make up for this lack, but it’s still not enough. Every photo I take from now on, she’ll be sicker than she was the day before.

I wish I had more of when we were happy and healthy. We have had so many adventures and wonderful times together, and barely any photos of them with her in them.

Accidents happen. Illness happens. Please don’t leave your family in the position mine is in.

With love,

Edit: I’m being called selfish a lot. I’m being told that I have no empathy, that I’m going to force my mother to be uncomfortable while she’s dying in order to fulfill my own needs. Those are very cruel and thoughtless things to say.

My mother is dying and I love her. I live with her. I will be cooking her meals and holding her head while she’s sick. I will be spending every evening with her talking, and driving her to the doctors appointments and the chemotherapy. I will be there when they decide to discuss end of life treatment. I will be the one arranging estate attorneys and funeral arrangements. She will never meet my future spouse or meet her grandchildren. She loves babies. I am her only child and I never gave her any grand babies. She will be growing more uncomfortable and in pain. She will lose her hair and waste away. She will lose her short term memory and find it harder to recall the good times. These will be my last memories of her.

You think I’m going to make my mother even more uncomfortable for my own selfish reasons. I’m not. I’ve asked for a family portrait this Christmas while she’s still feeling alright most days. Just one, for me and for my dad. She’s agreed, and she thought it was a good idea. She regrets not being in more photos.

You say it’s selfish to wish I had more mementos of when we were happy and driving out to the coast to see the sunrise. Maybe it is. But it’s my prerogative to wish for that. I’m allowed to grieve and to want to have photos to help remember her smile and how she smells and what her hugs feel like.

She’s beautiful and I love her. Maybe your family might want mementos like that one day of you. Because they love you.

I HATE having my photo taken. When I see the photo I'm always reminded that my outsides don't look anything like how I feel inside (not a gender thing, just a regular self image thing). And it plunges me into a brief but deep despair. I have been hard at work trying to reconcile the two versions of myself-- diet and exercise, dental work, experiments with various products that claim to help frizzy hair -- with the goal of someday feeling like I've earned the confidence of having my photo taken.

But I think your point is that the eyes of the people who will be looking at the photo will have more love for me than my own eyes do. I will absolutely try to remember that. It is a deep sadness to me already that I don't have any photos of me with my school-aged child, I can't imagine how she would feel if something unexpected happened to me.

So thank you for this encouragement right before the holidays. And I hope that you and your mother can spend lots of quality time together. If she has the strength, I recommend working on a project together, a quilt, a painting, or a Playlist of some of her favorite songs.

I wish I could stop doing it, personally. I don't have a lot of memories of when I was a teen and I wish I had pictures to remind me of things. Unfortunately for me it's an issue of trust. People would take pictures and then laugh at the "stupid faces" I made. I'm not very photogenic and people never failed to let me know that. Friends, family, didn't matter. Or they'd tell me how much weight I gained while looking at pictures of me or how I looked like I didn't want to be there and I should smile more. I tried for a long time. But now I don't trust anyone to take a good picture of me. Not even myself, because to me they all look ugly. I hate it.