The Only Photo of Me and My Mother at Five Years Old Is Gone

The Only Photo of Me and My Mother at Five Years Old Is Gone

I was doing something productive, for once. Cleaning out a drawer. Old receipts, a dead phone charger, a stack of photographs nobody had looked at in probably a decade — the kind of clutter you keep meaning to "deal with properly" and never do.

I went through them fast. Too fast. A pile for keeping, a pile for the bin, and somewhere in the second pile, without me noticing, went a photo I didn't even remember I owned until it was already gone: me, maybe five years old, sitting on my mother's lap in a kitchen that doesn't exist anymore, in a house that got sold twenty years ago. She's laughing at something off-camera. I'm not looking at the camera at all — I'm looking at her.

I didn't realize it was missing until three weeks later, when I went looking for it for something completely unrelated. And then... nothing. I went through every drawer, every box, every folder. Puf. Gone.

Here's the part that actually gets me, though — not that it's gone, but how easily it could have not been.

If I'd taken thirty seconds, at any point in the last however-many years, to take a photo of that photo with my phone — one tap, no thought required — it would still exist. Not the original, sure. But the moment. Her laugh. The kitchen. The way I was looking at her instead of the camera. All of it, saved, backed up, unlosable, for the cost of thirty seconds I genuinely did not have anything better to do with.

I didn't do it. I don't think most people do, honestly — not out of carelessness, just because nothing about an ordinary Tuesday tells you this is the last time you'll see this. You don't get a warning. You just get a drawer, and a stack of photos, and eventually — if you're not careful, or even if you are — a gap where one used to be.

So this isn't really advice. I don't have a five-step system. I have one very specific regret, and a request: if there's a photo somewhere in your house — a shoebox, a drawer, an album nobody's opened since the last funeral — that you'd actually mind losing, take thirty seconds. Right now, ideally, not "eventually." Photograph it. Upload it somewhere. Anywhere that isn't just that one physical copy sitting in one physical place.

You don't need a system. You need thirty seconds and to not be like me.

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If you want somewhere those photos — and the stories behind them — can actually live, permanently, Stella Memoria exists for exactly this. Not just for memorials. For the moment before you need one.