Making Sense of Loss - Seattle Family Photographer

Seattle Family PhotoshootSeattle Family PhotographyWest Seattle Family Photoshoot

4 May

When this mother contacted me about a family session with her and her son at Lincoln Park, I loved her right away. She told me that she had lost her husband tragically over a year before- and she and her son are still trying to navigate this new way of life without him.

When I say “without him” that feels untrue since he is everywhere, and you don’t get to simply move on. More like integrate the love with the loss, and find those moments of joy and deep gratitude that he was ever there- and that he helped create this beautiful boy. The strong love this family has can never be gone. Or as this beautiful mom put it to me in a text “finding light in the cracks.”

This photoshoot was both in loving honor of this wonderful heroic dad, and a way of embracing what you cannot change. Finding the love. Finding the healing.

I won’t pretend that I know what this feels like. I know what it was like to loose my mother, and the best thing I can do is to HONOR these beautiful people and show the connection and the love between them.

Through this meeting I fell into really liking Dom, who I will never get to meet. This family are huge nature lovers much like myself. I could not help but think that in my eyes, nature is God, so therefore Dom is within every bird, every rock, the clouds, the ferns, the trees. He is everywhere and I heard that he would have LOVED these photos, which is more than I could ever hope for.

“Two years without Dom. Two years of carrying his legacy. I will climb every mountain for him, both literally and figuratively, knowing he will forever have my back and would want me to just keep going. I see him and feel him in so many ways still… in our son, in all our friends and family, in the adventures and fun we STILL have, in these surprisingly sunny days with the mountain out (his favorite)… and I’m so comforted and reassured by that. His love is still there, our love is still there, the Invisible Strings are still so strong, and I am grateful every day for that.”

Recent quote- Miss Songbird

“You are gone, but thank you for all these soft, sweet things you left behind. In my home, in my head, in my heart.”

– Nikita Gill

“Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.”

– Emily Dickinson

“August 10th, 2009, 13 years ago, Dom proposed to me at my favorite place in the Columbia River Gorge: Crown Point. Today I visited it for the first time since losing him in observance of that anniversary. Of course it was hard and beautiful. It’s always both now.”