Four Years Of Them On A Lost Phone

You checked again in August.

You knew what it would say. You have checked it eleven or twelve times over two years, and every time the same folder is empty, and every time you go in with a small unreasonable hope that something has appeared.

Four years. From about the time she started walking to the year of the school thing.

And most of them were nothing. That is what people do not understand about it. They were not portraits. They were three hundred versions of a child on a carpet, blurred, half of them accidental, most of them of no interest to anybody who was not in that house.

And that is exactly what made them what they were, and it is exactly the kind of picture nobody ever takes again.

I want to say two things at the top and then not move off either of them.

The first is that this was a real loss.

Not an inconvenience, not a lesson about backing things up. You lost four years of a record of your children and it is not coming back, and the size of it is not measured by whether other people would consider a photograph important.

The second is what this article will not do.

I am not going to tell you the memories are what matter.

You will have heard that. Somebody said it kindly and probably meant it, and it is the standard thing, and it does something quite cruel underneath: it suggests that if the loss still hurts, you are attached to the wrong thing.

The photographs mattered. That is why you took them. A memory fades and a photograph does not, and a photograph shows you what you did not notice at the time, and that is a genuinely different thing from remembering, and losing it is a genuine loss.

I am not going to redeem this for you.

The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away

There is a sentence Job says in the first hour, and the useful thing about it is that scripture records it without explaining it.

Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. (Job 1:21, King James Version)

The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.

Now I want to be careful with this verse, because it gets used badly and I am not going to use it that way.

I am not saying God took your photographs. I do not believe a server failure or a phone in a river is God removing something from your household on purpose, and anybody who tells you what your loss was for is doing the thing that the friends do later in that book, which God rebukes them for by name at the end of it.

What I want from this verse is something else entirely, and it is the first half.

Job names the loss.

He says it out loud, plainly, in the worst hour of his life. He does not minimize it, he does not say it was only things, and he does not reach for a consolation. He states what has happened in the barest possible words: it was given, and it is gone.

And then he blesses God, which is a separate act. Notice that the blessing does not soften the naming. He does not say it was gone but it was not that important. The two sentences sit side by side without either one reducing the other.

That is what I want for you, because you have not had it.

Every conversation you have had about that phone ended with somebody making it smaller, and you have gone along with it, and you now describe it in a light voice as an annoying thing that happened.

It was not an annoying thing that happened. It was four years.

The loss is allowed to be named plainly and stay named, and it has never once had to be made smaller to be spoken about. Job 1:21 states what was given and what is gone without softening one word of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody checking an empty folder for the twelfth time.

What you actually lost

Here is the practical half, and it is worth being precise, because precision is what has been missing.

You did not lose the memories. You did not lose the childhood. You lost the record, and it is worth knowing exactly what a record does that a memory does not.

A photograph holds the things you were not paying attention to.

That is its particular gift. Behind your daughter on the carpet there is a kitchen you have since changed, a mug you have since broken, a light in a room in a house you have left, and the shape of somebody's hand at the edge of the frame. You never chose to record any of it, and it was recorded, and that is what makes an old photograph feel like standing in a room rather than thinking about one.

Memory does not do that. Memory keeps the thing you attended to and discards the rest, and it edits every time you use it.

So when somebody says the memories are what matter, they are offering you a substitute that does a different job. It is not the same thing and you know it is not, and being told that it is has made you feel unreasonable for grieving.

You are not unreasonable. You are correct about what a photograph is.

And here is the other true thing, which is not a consolation and is worth saying anyway.

The years happened. That child was on that carpet three hundred times, and you were there, and it was as good as you remember. The record is gone and the events are not undone by that. A thing that happened stays happened, whether or not anybody has a picture of it.

That is not compensation. It is just accurate, and after two years of checking a folder it may be worth having something accurate.

A photograph holds what you were not attending to, and a memory has never once been offered as a fair replacement for that. The written word names the loss plainly and refuses to shrink it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been made to feel unreasonable for grieving.

Write one of them down

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not a recovery.

Write down one thing you remember from a photograph you no longer have.

One. On paper, or in a note, it does not matter.

Not the whole thing. One detail from one picture. The blue coat. The way she held the cup with both hands. That he was standing on the arm of the sofa and nobody stopped him. What the kitchen looked like before you changed it.

Write the detail, in a sentence or two, and stop.

And here is what this is not.

It is not an attempt to reconstruct the archive. You are not going to write down four years, and if you try you will find out how much is gone and it will be a bad evening.

It is not a consolation exercise either. Writing one line does not replace the photograph and I am not going to pretend that it does.

What it is, is the first time anything about that loss has gone anywhere other than round in your own head.

For two years the only thing you have done about those pictures is check whether they are back. That is the whole of your relationship with them, and it is a loop, and the loop has no exit in it.

Writing one detail down is a different act. It puts one small piece of it outside you, in your own handwriting, where it exists in the world in a way it did not this morning. Not as a substitute for the photograph. As a thing you made, deliberately, about something that mattered.

And then stop. One. And you do not have to show it to anybody or ever look at it again.

You are able to put one piece of it outside your own head, and it has never once been offered as a replacement for what is gone. Job 1:21 names what was given and what was taken and stops there, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody writing down one detail about a blue coat.