The Last Family Photo

Grieving the family I lost and the family I never had

Photo contributed by author.

In our last family photo, we’re all smiling, of course. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say “of course.” There are plenty of family photos in which at least one child is pouting, grimacing, or actively crying.

The photo was taken at the Continental Divide, in the Rocky Mountains, in the same place my husband and I had posed 13 years prior. Back then, his dreadlocks were only an inch long, not even yet fully locked. I proceeded to twist them each week for 13 years and then some. I twisted them through two pregnancies, two births, multiple jobs, and one cross-country move.

Our last family photo doesn’t depict the last family vacation we took, but it does depict the last time we got it together to pose, the four of us, in front of a camera. Our last family vacation would take place nine months later, in March 2024, when I booked us an AirBnb near the Oregon Coast. During that so-called “vacation,” I spent a good bit of time wandering alone up and down the beach, crying into the whipping wind.

We all look so happy in our last family photo, so confident in our happiness, standing with our arms around one another at the Continental Divide. It’s hard even for me, one of the people prominently featured in the photo, to tell that the happiness was a lie. Or perhaps not a lie, but an inconsistent truth.

We are always desperate to believe in the happiness of families, ours and everyone else’s. We invest so much effort in capturing those staged smiles year after year. We post them online, print them on holiday cards, frame them to hang on our walls.

It is convincing, I have to admit. Looking at our last family photo, even now, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps I have made a terrible mistake. Perhaps the isolation and the fear and the anxiety and the exhaustion were all in my head. Perhaps I should have kept gritting my teeth and smiling for photos.

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Two weeks before our last family photo was taken, I’d texted a friend and told her I was pretty sure my marriage was over. You would never know that by looking at the photo. When the image came up in my iPhone memories — damn those iPhone memories! — my first thought was: Back when we were happy.

It took me a minute to remember that I wasn’t at all sure my husband would be meeting us in Colorado, that I’d taken an impromptu trip beforehand to see my mom and sister in California because the kids were at my mother-in-law’s and I couldn’t stomach the prospect of a week alone with my husband.

The whole point of sending the kids to my mother-in-law’s was to spend a week alone with my husband. It was supposed to be a week full of spicy food and spontaneous sex. But my husband had just taken a medical leave, and he was in no mood for either. I wasn’t mad at him for this, of course, but he was mad at me, along with the rest of the world.

The vacation in Colorado wasn’t really “our” family vacation — it was a family reunion with 60 (yes, 60) other family members, mostly my second and third cousins and other cousins various degrees removed from me. It happens every five years, but Covid had derailed our 2020 reunion, so there we all were, three years later. We’d missed the 2015 reunion because I’d just given birth to our son. I was excited for all the other happy nuclear family units to meet our happy nuclear family unit, to show everyone that I’d arrived in adulthood and was doing All The Things.

My husband and I would be celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary during the reunion and our son’s eighth birthday. We had made it this far.

We would make it for another 10 months.

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Those months were filled with so many lasts, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Our last family camping trip. Our last family trip to the pumpkin patch. Our last Thanksgiving dinner, our last Christmas as a family. Our last family hike. These are all documented too, but I am notably absent, the invisible presence behind the phone.

When I look at these photos, I’m not sure what to do with my grief. It is so complicated, so layered. I get no bereavement leave from the daily demands of life, no time to process. I listen to crooning songs about breakups when they match my mood, but the sadness they depict is too simple. It’s just about two lives, no longer intertwined. I envy it.

I even, on occasion, catch myself feeling jealous of widows and widowers. Their grief is sanctioned, easily understood. They brought nothing upon themselves, made no choices. They are victims of circumstance, clearly deserving of our sympathy.

But what about the wife who ended her marriage and upended her family? After the divorce papers were filed, I mostly felt relief. I’d contended with a lot of sadness during our separation, sadness commingled with solace and sometimes a heady sense of liberation. It wasn’t until that damn photo popped up on my iPhone that the finality of it sunk its teeth into me, that I realized we would never again pose for a family photo.

There is sadness in disentangling my life from my husband’s, yes, but it’s so much bigger than losing him. It’s losing us, our little unit of four, the little unit we created and nurtured and protected from all the harms Out There.

The little unit that persisted through ice storms and power outages, through a global pandemic, through four years of Trump, through wildfire smoke so thick it broke the air quality index. My someday ex-husband and I will now battle the ice storms, the wildfires, the pandemic threats, and yes, at least four more years of Trump from separate homes, sometimes with and sometimes without our children.

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A year after our last family trip to the pumpkin patch, I wasn’t sure if I should continue the tradition. I was worried it would make the kids sad, the notable absence of their father. But they were outraged when they found out I hadn’t made plans. So I piled them in the car the Friday afternoon before Halloween and we made a last-minute mad dash, most of the remaining pumpkins either still green or rotting on one side. We did all the things we’ve done every year for over a decade — the hayride, the hot dogs, the caramel apples.

I took a selfie of all of us in the hay wagon. By this point, my husband had been largely absent from his children’s lives since the beginning of June. Perhaps his absence was no longer notable. But I’m sure we still felt it, carrying out these specific annual family traditions, minus one member of the four-person unit that had once been our family.

Halloween came and went. My daughter’s birthday came and went. Thanksgiving came and went. Christmas is on the horizon.

I am going through all the motions, trying to keep the threads of continuity intact, even though our family has frayed. I’m managing to have some fun along the way. When it’s just me and the kids, we’re freed from the emotional storm cloud that had become my husband, and there is joy in that.

The grief catches me at unexpected times. I have yet to take down all the family photos we have hanging around the house. I’m not even sure if I should. Is there a protocol? We keep up photos of people who have passed. What about a person who is still living, a person who has deeply hurt me, but also a person who still means a great deal to my children, a person I still love in spite of myself?

I’ve seen these family photos so many times, I mostly don’t notice them. In fact, when my husband was still living here, he mentioned aloud on multiple occasions that we should update the photos. He meant of course that I should update the photos, but I was routinely paralyzed by the prospect of sifting through thousands of images on my phone and picking out just a handful to print.

Sometimes in passing, one of these photos will randomly catch my eye, and suddenly the tears will well, even if I’m feeling otherwise okay.

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I realize I’m not just grieving the family I had, but also the family I desperately wanted. For so long, I was able to convince myself that it was there, waiting for me, just around the next corner. As soon as we reached the next milestone or all the right circumstances fell into place.

We were the family I wanted for moments here and there. Laughing at the dinner table. Telling stories around a campfire. Singing along to Hamilton on road trips. Those moments felt both precious and slippery. They gleamed under shadows, hard to pluck out and hold onto. Most of these moments aren’t captured in photos. I was too busy to fish out my phone, too busy trying to hold on.

Maybe the family I desperately wanted doesn’t really exist. Maybe all of us are working to make our families look okay on the outside when on the inside, there are red-hot centers of fury and pain. Maybe I wanted a sitcom family, a family with conflicts that are real but always eventually resolved against a soundtrack of laughter. A lighter family, a funnier family, a family less weighted by trauma and fear.

I still allow myself to be fooled by other people’s family photos. I see them online or framed in their homes. The same five friends mail me holiday cards each year. I know there is nothing “real” about these photos. I know these kids don’t usually walk around in matching sweaters, I know their parents don’t typically wear white (because… parents). I know that for every photo in which everyone is smiling and the light is just right, there are a dozen more with people looking the wrong way or children blurred by incessant squirming or smiles that accent chin folds and crow’s feet.

Just as my nine-year-old son has learned that Santa is a lie but at the same time desperately still wants to believe, I can’t resist the allure of the family photo.

I could have had a happier family, to be sure. But even in happier families, there is usually a woman in the wings, tugging at hundreds of invisible strings, sweating to set the stage. All the precious moments, the ones that seem spontaneous to the rest of the family, happen because the stage has been set just so. And afterwards, there is always the cleaning up or tearing down, the packing or unpacking, the planning or debriefing.

Even in happier families, the mother is usually a little less happy than everyone else.

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We’re led to believe that our lives are linear, that if we follow all the right steps and manage to create just the right set of circumstances, we’ll achieve this state of being we like to call “happiness.” We are a culture of achievers, after all. Anything can be achieved if we just apply ourselves.

They say that human connection is the so-called “secret” to happiness, and I don’t doubt it. If there’s anything we need in this world, it’s less isolation and more connection. But also, let’s face it — humans can really piss us off sometimes. They worry us and irritate us and take us for granted. They expose us to the full range of human emotions, which we sometimes scurry from and sometimes wallow in. Sometimes we experience them in rapid succession, and sometimes we experience them all at once.

We strive to maintain some semblance of order, of control over our days. We share the milestones, the meals, the views. We show everyone else that our lives are moving forward as they should. That our kids are getting older, that our careers are progressing, that our marriages are blossoming.

Yet between the photos, there is so much tedium, so much muck, so much longing, so much regret. There are good years and bad years, and within them, good days and bad days, and within them, good moments and bad moments and moments that slip away unnoticed. Sadness is punctuated by joy and joy is tinged with sadness at the edges.

Our last family photo floods me with nostalgia, even though I know I wasn’t very happy at the time. But at the moment it was taken, I was happy to be in a beautiful place with my family. Later, I was happy to show off my beautiful family in this beautiful place.

I allow myself to grieve the loss, even if the thing I lost was mostly an illusion. Perhaps it felt real at times to my children. It felt real at times to me.