I'm slowly forgetting your face...

I’ve semi recently moved home and blended my children with my partner’s. This was a step that we were all excited for, after all the other giant steps we’d completed the final piece was coming together to create our own new “hybrid” family. It’s been both a rollercoaster and a joy and feels like an achievement to my partner and me. Yet dismantling one house to form another home, presented a new dilemma and brought up an old question - what do we do with our photographs when they only feel relevant for 50% of you and what happens when some of the relevancy has been erased?

It feels awkward.

Whilst I was pondering this, I came across a social media trend that I didn’t know existed - I’m slowly forgetting your face. This seemed so random to me that I couldn’t help but find out more, only to discover that it was designed for people experiencing grief not just for people but pets. Not really the most uplifting social media trend I’ve come across but one that’s bringing grief into the spotlight and highlighting how important it is to acknowledge how impactful it is on our lives and mental health. Grief was certainly not something I remember being discussed much in my childhood and while I wouldn’t want to denigrate the suffering of the many widows/widowers in the world, divorce is a grief in itself and one that I’d argue gets less validation than it deserves. Divorce grief usually gets muddled up with the often inevitable fighting that comes with the end of a marriage or long relationship. Even worse for the person initiating the divorce whose grief may get dismissed as irrelevant, since they supposedly “asked” for it. I’ll never stop saying divorce is a complicated mix of endings and transitions and new beginnings in one and that’s just for the adults. I for one remember walking round my house and thinking what the f**k do I do with these photos now? It felt to me that nearly half my life became a taboo topic over night, something to shuffle away into the attic never to be seen again.

Honestly? That was tricky for me and, frankly, I refused to accept it. Not just for myself but for my children. What I really didn’t want for them was to feel like they couldn’t access the small amount of time in their life when we had been a nuclear family. The guilt at the time of not having this, meant I was keen to preserve the memories they did have.

I remember being a small child myself and discovering my parents wedding album in the attic, it felt like a secret, a window into a life where love bloomed between my parents and not poison. I used to return to that album when I got the chance. Not just because it offered me an alternative story but because, simply put, they were beautiful pictures. I was not a girl that dreamed of her wedding day her entire life but I did marvel at seeing my mum dressed in a beautiful gown with a huge smile and confetti cascading from the sky. Men in top hats and children in pretty dresses. Weddings are key moments in people’s life stories and photographs have that wonderful ability to offer us a snapshot of something that the viewer can add their own meaning to. For me, at the time, looking at that album, I saw something of my parents love. Something that offered me a context to understand why my mum never really recovered from her divorce. A context to my childhood.

I suppose what I’m thinking is that if we were a QR code right now, photographs are the things that make it readable. Make some of our life make sense and if we’ve lost access to some of those pixels, it makes our QR code harder to read. How many of us have looked at a picture so many years later and seen something totally different? A photo that offers reflection on something we maybe couldn’t see at the time. Or, a reminder of something we’ve totally forgotten. Even more poignantly, how many of us hold pictures of a last moment accidentally caught? A precious look between loved ones or a laughter that gets frozen in time, immortalised.

None of this article is designed for me to tell you that post-divorce all your photos should remain up, I categorically know that would be weird. But, what I do want to encourage is for you to see those photographs not as moments tainted by what happened next, but as parts of your story. A timeline perhaps which makes them important artefacts for your own personal journey. If I were to wind back the clock, I found myself on a process of recategorising my experience and my feelings towards my first husband through the photos that we took together. First, of course, I removed the wedding photos from the wall but I didn’t discard them. I just put them in another room. Stumbling across them whenever I did, of course, brought new feelings each time. Like any grieving process, these feelings weren’t linear, sometimes anger would flash or resentment would settle in my stomach that I was now doing alone what should have been done as a pair but eventually my feelings held less and less pain. In time, the photos did make their way into the attic but whatever mood I was in when they went, I preserved them in such a way that when we do find them again - we’re looking at the beauty of the moment, not dwelling on the past. I share this story not in judgement for what you may do, but to demonstrate that this was what I personally needed to do in order to reach acceptance. An acceptance that my family didn’t turn out the way I expected and that was ok. I’m offering this story as an example of another way to be inside of a divorce.

Of course, my home was furnished with more than just matrimonial snapshots and with these, I rearranged them slowly. My ex-husband had lost his significance to me and may have even changed his role for our children but he will always be their dad and they deserved to access their own memories of him. These were not mine to steal. So, I quietly shifted some things around. Favourite photos were moved to their bedrooms when I couldn’t bear to see them in the rest of the house. Less obvious ones were replaced - same frame different snap. If I felt sentimental about one, I often left it in the frame, under the new one and I would wonder about which photo might come next or what I would be doing when I next came across the discarded one. I occasionally laughed to think they may end up in a charity shop one day and someone else altogether may find them. My process was very much not out with the old but lets move on to the next - even when the rage stage of my grief hit somehow seeing a photo of him (perhaps in the children’s room) gave me a nudge to silently rage on whatever topic I needed before moving on with my day. In many ways, I didn’t need to slowly forget his face, I needed to slowly recategorise it from someone that once meant the world, back to just a person again. Someone separate from me.

And now? As I’m starting again, I’ve reflected that photos have always been something that ground me and I’m eager for my new home to represent a whole life, not just some of it. By this I mean, the things that came before my partner and me were together, not just the moments that we’ve all shared since giving us all permission to talk about the past as well as look to the future. To coin a phrase, we’re the ‘sum of all things’ which will always hold more value to me than just half the story…