Episode 58 - How to use Photography to Process Grief

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HANNAH: Tell me a little bit about what you do with photography and how that helps manage big emotions like grief and kind of how you got into it.

SHANNON: As a photographer, I think that it's my job to witness people. I mean, in the simplest way I can say that, because that's what photography does. I really like that about photography as a practice of art because it does deal with realism. And I think in a lot of ways also takes the pressure off of people of trying to be creative because what you're doing is deciding which parts of real life you want to represent and how you want to represent them. You don't necessarily have to come up with something fantastic or new. You're just really practicing being a thoughtful witness of what's happening.

And what I've noticed in my own experience is that, and in being with other people, is that sometimes that witness part just feels like it's impossible, that in order to get through hard things, we kind of put on blinders, and we believe that the best way to get through the very hard thing, or the very terrible thing, is to kind of stop paying attention to what's going on. And I do think that is necessary a lot of the time. I also know that in order for us to be able to process all of the things that are happening, that at some point, we have to go back and be with that stuff that we weren't able to be with at the time.

And so when I have my camera and I'm with a family, that is really what I'm looking to do. I'm looking to document what's there. I'm looking to tell the story honestly for them, so they have a very important chapter in their history that they can keep, that they can go back to as they need and take the time with to process. And it's something that is really useful for families that are going through things like long-term medical treatment, whether it's for cancer or someone is getting, getting an organ transplant, or it's some other chronic illness where there's a lot of, there's a tendency for friends and family to diminish that experience because it's chronic, it's every day.

And it just sort of, it, it's still very much a part of life for the person that's experiencing it, but it becomes less so for everyone else. And to show them those things, and, and validate them through what I see, and have a different way of saying, yes, this, this happened, and it's terrible, and it's as bad as you think it is, and you're not exaggerating. And what you feel is absolutely appropriate.

So doing that for medical families, for grievers, for families that are planning funerals, or doing hospice care for somebody, even as they're anticipating all of that, because anticipatory grief is, that's its own kind of horrible, right? Because there's, there's the anxiety of not knowing, and not knowing when. But yeah, I want to be a witness for people that feel invisible, because it's frustrating, and it's hard when people that you have relied on, and that you can normally count on for things, suddenly become so uncomfortable with you, and the things that are happening in your life, that they turn away or they disappear.

And so being able to give a family or an individual some photographs of that time, or to show them how to use whatever camera they have to start being with their own emotions, and being their own witness of things, and looking for maybe the little stuff that they would normally not pay attention to, that I think is also helpful, because I would honestly much rather teach people how to do it than do it myself, because if I teach them how to do it, then they can always be there for themselves. But otherwise it’s just me showing up.

HANNAH: Yeah. So it's like being, I remember you said it was kind of like being a witness for yourself, being your own witness.

SHANNON: All of this did start as a project just for me, because I was in one of those situations that was uncomfortable for people around me, people in my family, people that were my close friends, people that I loved and trusted. And I was living it every day, and I couldn't get away from it. There was no escape for me.

And it felt like as the months dragged on, that I couldn't talk to people that I wanted to talk to about it, because they weren't emotionally available for it. They didn't have the skills, they didn't have the comfort level, they weren't willing to put themselves in that place with me. And so they did that gradual disappearing thing.

There were people that said things that were just shockingly awful that I kicked out, because I couldn't deal with that. But none of that was about me or my experience. It was about their own discomfort with all of it, because it's very human to see someone else's suffering or situation and immediately think, well, gosh, I'm so glad that that hasn't happened to me because then this and this and this would happen.

And then you kind of get hung up in that. And when you're talking to the other person, that becomes the thing. How it's impacting you becomes the thing. And that's not helpful to the other person. So having my camera with me was just the, it was the best way I could think of to validate myself, right? That I had a whole bunch of people in my life that weren't willing to look at these things that I wanted to show them.

That I felt like I wasn't able to communicate the magnitude of what I was feeling, how intense it was, how severe it was, how enduring it was, how much I felt like I was being buried. And with each layer that went on, I thought I'm that much further from feeling like who I am and being able to be myself because I'm buried under all of this, and I have to dig out of this first before I can feel like a human again. I mean, that's what it was for me.

And so noticing the little things that were happening in the days as well as the big things. And just using photography as a means to acknowledge them and say, yes, I see that. It's a lot like mindfulness. Where you're not... And mindfulness is... I am an anxious person. I've been an anxious person my entire life. I have diagnoses to prove that.

And, you know, when the providers talk to me about meditation and mindfulness, I'm thinking, OK, well, I've tried all of that, and it's just so hard for me. It's so hard for me. And it feels like practicing it in the early stages applies more pressure because then I become frustrated with my inability to quiet my mind. But when I pick up a camera, it's different that I can have that mindful experience because I am trained as a photographer. That is what I do, that looking at what's happening and watching things unfold. And I think in photography, the big thing is allowing.

I am a documentary photographer, so I don't give any direction of things. I am watching them unfold themselves. So it's my job to be responsive to what is happening and to allow that without pushing my own agenda on it, which of course is what I find most helpful in mourning and grieving as well. If I get tied to it looking or feeling or sounding a certain way, then I'm going to stifle the whole thing. When really that stuff needs space to move around and do what it's going to do, and otherwise I'm going to get in the way, and I'm going to create another obstacle, and I'm going to make it harder for myself. So with a camera, I just give myself permission to sit back and witness.

I am taking it in, and I don't have to process it at that time. I'm just looking for what is the story here? What's the topic sentence? What are the main points? What details are there? How can I weave all of this together? How do I present it so that it would make sense to someone who wasn't there?

And that for me brings everything together with much less pressure. Plus, then I have this record that I can go back to when I'm ready. Because that is a big part of grieving, right? It's not just an assignment that you do once, and then it's finished. If only, right?

Yeah, I know, as much as we want it to be. And there's this whole thing in developmental psychology. When I first started studying psychology as an undergrad, I took a developmental class, and I thought, well, this is going to be kid stuff, right? I had always equated developmental psychology with young people. And in reality, it goes through the entire lifespan, because as humans, we continue to develop. And we may be developing in what other people think of as being more like regressive ways.

Our development may actually lead to a decrease in skill or a decrease in ability as we age. That's still development though, right? Because we're developing maybe more needs for external care, or more needs for accessibility, or more needs for accommodation. And so as we're going through our lives, and we're processing big things that have happened to us, and we're grieving, our understanding of what that means changes. Every year of our lives. So we see this a lot in kids, where when someone they love, a friend or a parent or a family member dies when they're very young, that their grieving process seems like it just goes on and on and it’s so wildly different.

And that's because their brains are changing so much, and they know more now than they did last year. And they have a different understanding of what death is, and what it isn't, and how it works. And even as adults, we think that we know all of that stuff, but still we continue to be shaped by our environments, and we continue to learn things. So my understanding of what life means, and what death represents at 45 is different than it was at 35, and certainly different than it was at 25. So you can experience the death of someone or any kind of loss as an adult, and still have that interesting developmental cycle where things keep popping up, and it feels like they're completely fresh. Like, well, why didn't this come up before?

And it's that it couldn't have. Because that's not who you were at that time, that you didn't have the skills or the abilities or the needs to process that then. And so stilling things with photography for me is enormously helpful in that perspective, too, because I can go back. I don't have to worry about remembering every detail, which is something that I pressure myself about a lot, because I'm looking around and thinking, oh, this is one of those important, defining moments of my life, and I need to remember everything, and I can't. Yeah, it's not possible. Yeah, and you kind of are in shock a lot of the time when someone dies or when someone is dying.

There's just so much to pay attention to. And you can't do all of that. And even if you think that you're processing well in that moment, the future version of you five years from now or 20 years from now is going to have a new appreciation of what all of that represented. And it's going to be a different kind of grieving experience then than it is now. And both of those grieving experiences are important and valuable.

HANNAH: Yeah, so our processing never ends because we are constantly changing and evolving. And it doesn't mean like, oh crap, I never fully dealt with this. I thought I did. Like, oh gosh, I did it wrong. But it's just like, we're a different person, so we're going to have new facets to explore and deal with and give meaning to.

SHANNON: That's exactly right.

HANNAH: Yeah, I never thought of it like that, but that makes so much sense.

SHANNON: Well, you know what I've noticed is that people do think about it a lot with kids, and they think about it in a very frustrated way. Because kids have what adults consider to be disordered processing of traumatic events. Because they don't have the same skills that we have.

They don't have the same connections in the brain that we have. And they're working with equipment that is just not made to do that as efficiently or as effectively as our adult versions can. And so they're just trying stuff on as they are learning things, and they're changing things about their self-concept and their relationships within their family and their community and the world and who they are as people, and that's going to continue to change.

And it just seems like such a big thing coming from such a small person, you know, that doesn't have very much experience. But that's really them saying these things out loud and trying to make sense of them and then feeling very uncomfortable about it because adults around them are, shh, shh, shh, we don't talk about that. You know, you just, you're fine.

That happened six years ago. You're just, we're not gonna, we're not gonna talk about that again. But as adults, you know, we're carrying that forward too. And we're not appreciating in ourselves that we have that same need. We have that need to be able to revisit things because they just make sense in a different way now. Or maybe they don't make sense at all, and they did then.

And like you said, it's not that we haven't fully processed it. That's an interesting kind of like capitalist view of grieving, where we think that we're good grievers or we're not, or we're efficient or productive grievers, or we're grieving in the right way, which some people even sell programs about. And it's none of that. It's a lifelong commitment, as long as you keep that attachment to the person or the being or the situation or circumstance, whatever, that you had an attachment to that's not there anymore, or it's not accessible in the same way. And we don't just do a good job once and then consider ourselves healed or finished.

HANNAH: That is a very capitalistic viewpoint.

SHANNON: Yeah, it's much more like a river carving a canyon. It's going to keep doing stuff, right? And we can't stop it. Even if we stuff things in a closet and close the door and barricade it, eventually the flow is going to be so powerful that it will just break down the door and all of the stuff will come out and we'll have to deal with it, whether we're ready or not. But there's no formula, there's no set of steps, there's no prescription that anybody can offer that says if you do it this way, then you won't have these problems later. Because grief isn't a problem, it's a way of continuing a relationship and it's a way of adjusting your life.

It's this process of ongoing learning, really, because we're learning about who we are in relationship to the attachment or the relationship and how that changes, how we interact with all other things in people.

HANNAH: Yeah, I like, first of all, I love the metaphor of the water carving out a canyon. I think that's a beautiful metaphor. And then also what you were saying about how grief is just our relationship with the person continuing. And basically, it's the love. And I know that I've heard that a lot, and it could seem cliche, grief is love. But it is, though.

SHANNON: Yeah, I think of grieving. One of the hangups I have about grief stuff in culture is that it's commonly associated with being sad. Oh, I'm so sad and grieving. And that's the only presentation that there is. Grief equals sadness or sorrow or anguish. And to me, grief is this jumble of all of the emotions that I would regularly experience in the relationship were that someone alive and well or alive and not well.

So I can love someone and feel frustration. I can love someone and feel irritated or annoyed. I can love someone and feel upset or sad or angry or delighted. I can love someone and laugh with them. I can love someone and feel all kinds of things. And for me, grieving is figuring out how do I keep that with me? I don't think it's about letting go at all. I think it's about staying. That even though there's this, the physical, tangible stuff may have changed.

That death specifically doesn't end relationships. That we can still tell the stories, that we can still have the memories. That doesn't keep us living in the past, like a lot of people think. I suppose there are ways that it can. But I think about the ones that I love that have died. And it is important for me to find ways to continue to involve them in my life.

To talk to them or to notice, because I like noticing, you may have noticed that I'm noticing. That when I see or hear or smell something that reminds me of them, I have that moment where I go back to a time with them or I'm just thinking of them or saying their name or something like that. Where I'm not kidding myself.

It's not like I'm trying to bring anybody back to life. But the attachment is still very much alive. And I can't just let go of that because of death. I have a belief that I would suffer less if I didn't have that attachment, that love with someone. I think for me that I want to keep that. So it's just learning about ways that I can do that, that make sense and are integrated into my life, that grief doesn't become a dedicated, specific event, that I build things around it so that when I do notice something that takes me off guard, that I can roll with that, and that I don't feel like it's going to sweep me off my feet, which still happens sometimes, because that's how life works.

But that I am aware that that's going to happen, and I want to build enough things around that and enough skills so that when it does, it feels like a good thing that I'm having a visit from someone that I haven't been with in a while.

HANNAH: Yeah, that's beautiful. And I so agree that we mostly think of grief as sadness and anguish. And I think some things that can come from that is that when people's sadness lifts a little bit or starts to, or they feel other emotions other than sad, they kind of panic and feel like the sadness equals the love, and that when the sadness is gone, like, oh my God, where did the love go? Like, it means I don't miss them. It means I don't care about them. It means I don't love them.

And then I do think that that can keep people stuck. I think it did for me too, because it was like to show my love for her, I have to like hold on to the sadness as tightly as I can. Yeah, it's tricky. But like, I love what you said about how like, you can love them and laugh, you can love them and be joyful, love them and be annoyed and be sad and all the things.

SHANNON: Yeah, I noticed that quite a bit in people too, and in myself sometimes, that it feels like somehow I would be dishonoring, or devaluing or minimizing someone’s contribution to my life. If I don't have a suitable, I guess more of a mourning period than a grieving period, right? I feel like I have to have mourning being the outward expression of grieving that other people could notice, and grieving being more of the internal stuff. It certainly can feel like that, and that's where I lean on my belief that a relationship is more than one-dimensional.

It has many, many facets. And so in order to be the best partner in the relationship that I can be, I also need to open myself to feeling a whole bunch of things. That if I try to program what my emotions are going to be or say, well, I'm only open to feeling this kind of emotion in this time window, that I'm limiting myself and then I'm limiting my connection. So as uncomfortable and sometimes painful as it can be, because like the first time that you laugh about something after someone dies, it can just feel wrong.

HANNAH: Yeah, it feels so guilty.

SHANNON: Yeah, there's that big guilty feeling where it feels like you've just committed a crime of morals. And that's not the case at all, right? But we have stifled ourselves so much by not talking about these things and just not giving ourselves the support that we need to experience this.

And it's, you know, there are still cultures where it is the norm, but in cultures where there is a dedicated mourning period, where there is a uniform that you wear during mourning, and it's for a certain period of time, typically a year, and that the family is restricted from participating in activities during that time, that they don't do any social events, that they generally aren't seen in public, you know, those kinds of things. It's just, it's very, it's odd. It's great on one hand to have that community expectation that yes, I am not going to be quite myself for the next year, while I figure out how everything works without this person in my life every day. But also that, well, let's keep you out of the community.

HANNAH: Yeah, like forcing them to do it's not good.

SHANNON: You're not allowed to do any dancing. You're not allowed to go to any social gatherings. You know, if you need to go to the grocery store, you can do that. But you really shouldn't be doing much of anything else other than grieving. And oh, my gosh, that's a lot of pressure. That's, you know, on one hand, we have the cultures that say you get two weeks.

HANNAH: Yeah. And then be back to normal.

SHANNON: You're yeah, if you're sad after that, then that's a problem. And then there's this other thing where we want to lovingly shun you from society so that you have the time that you need to process all of this stuff, but also so that we don't have to see it and we don't have to be a part of it.

HANNAH: There's got to be a good in between.

SHANNON: Right. And my gosh, everybody is different, too. Like we were just talking about, we're all developing as adults even. And so our grieving experiences are going to change just around the same loss over the course of our lives. And so you could have a dedicated year of grieving and mourning and then still have that come back and bite you in the butt a couple years later because something else in your life makes an important movement or shift. And now you have maybe different values or maybe your beliefs about spirituality have changed or you have new information about who you are as a person. And so you have to take that back to all of the stuff that's happened before and kind of rework it.

We can't shun people. Yeah, we can't shun people and tell them, this is your dedicated grieving time. Don't do anything else. But we also can't expect people to snap back to the way that they were before because that's easy, convenient and comfortable for us when in reality they're never going to be the person that they were before their someone died. That's just silly.

HANNAH: Yeah, it's like what we chatted about last time we talked a couple weeks ago, which where like the patriarchy and capitalism are both like squashing our emotions, like our, remember you said, like our grief is expected to be quiet, quick, elegant, like respectful, efficient. Yeah. And I had always thought about how capitalism affected it.

I don't know why, but that was an easy connection for me to make in life. Just like, oh yeah, like of course they want me to go back to work because they want me to be a good worker. You know, they don't want the economy to collapse if, you know, everyone gets more bereavement time or whatever. But I forgot about the patriarchy! Like of course that would affect it too.

SHANNON: And we see grieving typically as a very maternal, female energy kind of thing. Men are not given the same parameters for grieving. And there's a lot of bad stuff that comes from that.

HANNAH: Oh, yeah. That's so bad.

SHANNON: It's a mess. You know, that somebody somewhere decides, well, I'm going to change this thing because it works better for me. And then foists that on a bunch of other people. And before you know it, it becomes this social norm. It's so bizarre how that happens.

HANNAH: Yeah, I'm like, where did it start? Like, if only I could pinpoint the start, but I don't know if that's possible to do that.

SHANNON: Yeah, it would be interesting to look at cultures that are more matriarchical versus patriarchal. Oh. And see if there are differences in that. I'm curious about that.

HANNAH: Yeah, I am too.

SHANNON: Yeah, that would be an interesting research area for sociology and that kind of thing. The other thing is that we really want to put policies and structures around what grieving should look like and how as community members and family members and friends and coworkers, we should be supporting that, or we should be recovering, or we should be healing. And it's just so different for everyone that even myself, I might have the expectation that all of my grieving experiences would be similar because I am the same person.

But my relationships are all different. The histories of those relationships are all different. Some of them are more complicated than others. Some of them have more history than others. Some of them I have more of my own personal skills around in terms of just the relationship than I do with others. And so that capitalist need to very neatly define things.

And then on the other end, for people who are grief coaches to come up with these packages and systems of how to grieve well and how to grieve efficiently and moving grief to gratitude and all of that stuff. There's a lot of good things in there. We also need to remember that it's different every single time. Even for the same individual, it's different every single time. So recommending people or expecting that there's going to be something orderly or normal about the experience is problematic. That's one of the things that I really like about the photography part of this, is that it is...

I don't go into any circumstance with this version of what photographers call a shot list. A shot list is a list of images that you would expect, that you expect or your client expects you to be able to deliver at the end of the assignment. They're very popular, common for things like weddings or events. But if I go into something like that with a shot list, I stop looking at the individuals. I stop noticing the situation, and I start looking for those things that I'm expected to find.

HANNAH: Oh, interesting.

SHANNON: And that's where I begin concentrating. And to me, that feels really gross. So I don't do those, because I want things to happen as they naturally would, and I want the circumstance to tell me what's important. And instead of doing a shot list, what I talk to people about is their values. What kinds of things are important to you? Not specific images.

I really want a photograph of these two people holding hands. Okay, well, if that happens, I will get that for you, right? But we're not going to make this a production because this is your real life, and it's not meant to be in a magazine, and it's not scripted. So giving people the space and the freedom and the autonomy to have the experience that is meaningful for them, that works for them right now, even if it feels like it's not working at all, because a lot of time, grieving does feel like that, right? We all think that we're doing such a bad job of it, and really we're just hanging in there. But yeah, I really like that part about photography, that it encourages me to just pay attention, to be a witness, to not make judgments about what I think should be happening or what happened at the last three times I was with a family.

But what is important for this family right now? What are the things that they might be too stressed or overwhelmed to pay attention to that maybe I could see for them that I think is going to be helpful for them later on?

HANNAH: It's really cool how you use photography in this way because it's almost like twofold. One, it helps you to witness yourself in the moment and be mindful and open to whatever's happening. And second of all, it gives you an opportunity to reflect and process later on when maybe you couldn’t in the moment.

SHANNON: Yeah, because there's just so much happening. If someone you love is dying, you're close to that person. It's a friend or family member. There's just a lot happening. You know, there's the emotional stuff, of course. Then there's all the logistical things, the stuff that people don't talk about as much. And not just logistical for the person who's dying, but for you and for your family. So if you are sitting vigil with someone, that means that you are going to be away from your family for a little while. So you have all of those logistics to work out.

Who is going to take care of the animals, or who's going to take care of the young people, or what do you do about work? Those kinds of things. Who's watering your plants? Our brains can only handle so many things, and they're already processing so much stuff that a lot of the details about what's happening, it just gets lost. It's not that we don't see it. It's just that we see it, and then the brain says, not now.

HANNAH: It's on overload.

SHANNON: Yeah, this other thing over here. Pay attention to this. And that for me, well, I don’t know. It's hard to say which side of this is more valuable in my own personal experience, because I do really like what photography does for me in the moment, because I can calm myself down. It's really good for my anxiety, because it is allowing. It is creating space. But I think for me that it's the later part, where I can go back. And I like to have extra processing time. And things like grieving and living through very difficult events are extra stressful for me, because I want to do them well.

I've been trained as a very good capitalist. And I also, I want to feel like I've completed the work, that I've given it the attention that it needs and deserves. So that I can have some peace in my life, surrounding that whole experience. But to do that, I can't just live through it, and then think about it a couple times, and say, yeah, I'm okay. I got this. I have done the work. Because even sitting in therapy or counseling doesn't do that for me in the same way.

I worry about the things that I've forgotten. And I think, well, if I had just loved more, if I had paid closer attention, if I had done this or that, I would remember this. And by me not remembering, that must mean that I didn't love enough, or that this wasn't important enough to me, that I have disappointed this person, or dishonored this person's memory. And oh my gosh, it's none of that. It's that, it's a psychological crisis. It's an emotional crisis.

And you can't do all of that stuff. And it's okay that you can't do all of that stuff, because there still has to be room in your brain for doing other things, like making decisions about what to eat, you know, or other stuff like that. So it's pretty normal for me to revisit things. Gosh, I have stuff from 10 or 15 years ago that I will pull out and look at with photographs. And it feels, it feels fresh in a lot of ways. It's sort of like putting things in a vacuum sealer, you know, the little food saver things.

You put whatever food in there, and you suck all of the air out of it, and then it lasts for this unnaturally long time. And I like that about photographs because when I go back to them, it feels, I know that it's the same experience. It's the same event, the same circumstance. And because of what I've learned since and how I'm able to pay attention and that I've already processed 2,836 other pieces of information about that, I can now go back and pick up 2,837. And that for me is helpful, and I can do that as many times as I need.

HANNAH: That sounds, that does sound helpful, and it sounds almost counter to maybe someone's first instinct, which would be, I'm just using a random example, but let's say people are gathered around someone's deathbed. If someone started taking pictures, it might seem disrespectful. You're like, no, I don't want to remember this.

I want to remember the good times. If I put myself in that situation, I think the last thing I would think to do is pull out my camera. And I think that might be tied to our culture of suppression. Let's just get through this and then forget it, and then just think about the happy memories.

SHANNON: Right. I definitely have a lot of discussions similar to that with families. And what I, my point of view on this is that this is all family history. And we study history because it helps us understand who we are now. And it helps us understand what might happen in the future. These are possibilities. And it doesn't mean that we are dooming ourselves to repeat history. It doesn't mean that we are sticking ourselves in the past. It means that we have access to information, and it seems responsible to use that information.

Right. But also because with our own families, we're dealing with people, people that we love. In our chosen families, we're dealing with people that we love.To me, it doesn't seem right to just leave them behind because it's easier and more convenient for me. And learning about history requires that we learn about the rough stuff, because that's where we learn the most. If history class were all about the great things that people invented and how lovely they are, and the rosy view of colonialism, for example.

HANNAH: I mean, that's how my history classes were.

SHANNON: I've had those history classes too, and I remember I had a teacher. I took AP US. History in high school. My teacher's name was Mrs. Tooney. Fabulous human being. She taught US History like she was a reporter for the National Enquirer. She was digging up dirt on people. She was humanizing them. These leaders that we have been taught to revere for all of the great things that they did, she would say, oh, let me tell you about this dude Hamilton or Jackson. And she was laying out all of the stuff about the really crappy things that they did and how that was just overlooked for various reasons.

But it's important to know that stuff. It's important to acknowledge the Holocaust. All of genocide and eugenics and colonialism and all of this other stuff, forced boarding schools and sterilization of people. Those are things that we need to pay attention to. And ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

And also when we ignore it, we deny ourselves the opportunity to learn from the experience. We don't have conversations about difficult things. We don't learn how to think about it, compare it to our values, and practice standing up and saying, yeah, that's wrong.

That should not have happened. Not that we're thinking about all the other things that people could have done or should have done, but it helps us to be informed about it so that when something similar happens next time, we can recognize it and be prepared and perhaps change the future. And that's the best part of studying history, because the good stuff is always going to stick with us.

We're very good at carrying that forward, and it just folds into our lives. But the hard stuff, the unpleasant stuff, the stuff that we think is so terrible that it should be private or not talked about, that's the stuff that we need to discuss and get out there so that it becomes, not that it becomes less terrible, but that we learn some language and some skills around how to address it.”

Many people assume that photographing around death and dying and the grieving process is just morose and weird and inappropriate. And I can understand that. And on the other hand, I see that that discomfort is mostly about social things and that as humans, we have inherent curiosity about stuff and that we like to pay attention to things.

That is what our brains are designed to do. That's one of the things that makes us uniquely human is that we're very good processors of information and we're really good at finding patterns and trying to make sense of the things that we see instead of taking them for granted. And photography in this way is a fairly gentle introduction to playing with some of that.

That the photographs don't need to be about cold dead hands or colostomy bags or anything else that you think that you're not going to want to revisit. But it's more about the process of learning how to notice, learning how to witness, learning how to see things without immediately making judgments about them. And instead seeking to represent them accurately.

And it's a skill that I call on a lot more than I ever thought that I would. Just being able to notice the prescription bottles that are lined up in the cabinet, or the cup of tea that has the lipstick on it, or you know the hairbrush that still has a few strands of hair in it, not many. Those kinds of things, those little things that in daily life I might overlook because I'm hurrying and I want to rush to the next thing, and I want this to be over, and I want to feel better.

And coming back to those small things that are not the anchors of the day, but they're kind of, I don't know, maybe little checkpoints along the way, where I can check in and say, yeah, that's how it works. That is an important detail. I think encouraging people to be able to do that is a good and worthy thing, and you don't know if it's going to be helpful until you try it.