Short, occasional writing on memory, grief, and the craft of holding on to what matters.
A short list of questions worth asking now, while you still can — and why the ordinary ones matter more than the big ones.
Everyone tells you to ask about the big things — the war, the wedding, the year everything changed. Those stories usually get told anyway, at funerals and reunions, polished from years of retelling. The ones that disappear are smaller: what did the kitchen smell like on a Sunday? What song did she hum without noticing? What was the joke only the two of you understood?
"The ordinary is what disappears first — and what you miss most."
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
Start there. Ask what a normal Tuesday looked like in 1974. Ask what they were afraid of at twenty. Ask what they'd tell themselves now, if they could. The answers rarely come out polished, and that's exactly the point.
Why a still image forgets the one thing you miss most — the sound of a voice, the way someone paused before laughing.
A photograph freezes a face, but it can't hold a voice. It can't hold the half-second pause before someone laughs, or the way they said your name differently than anyone else did. Those details live in memory for a while — and then, quietly, they don't.
This is the gap film fills that photography never could. Not because video is more advanced, but because it captures time itself — rhythm, timing, breath. A photo tells you someone was there. A recording lets you hear them still be there, for a few more minutes.
We're not against photo albums — we keep plenty ourselves. But we'd argue every album is missing its most important page: the one that moves.
What a film can hold that a eulogy never quite can, and why restraint is the most important choice in the edit.
A eulogy is written under pressure, delivered once, and remembered imperfectly by a room full of people who are also grieving. It's a lot to ask of a few pages of paper. A film gets to be revisited — which changes what it's for.
The instinct when editing something this personal is to include everything: every story, every clip, every photo anyone hands you. We almost always cut it down instead. Grief doesn't need volume. It needs the two or three moments that are actually true, given room to breathe.
"Restraint isn't leaving things out. It's deciding what deserves to be watched again."
On the strange grief of realising a piece of shaky, unremarkable footage is the last one that exists.
Nobody films the last time on purpose. It's usually something ordinary — a birthday, a Sunday lunch, someone complaining about being filmed at all. Nobody in the room knows it's the last one, so nobody treats it that way.
That's what makes finding it later so disorienting. The footage is shaky, badly lit, forgettable by every normal standard — and suddenly the most valuable thing a family owns. We've learned not to judge raw footage by how "good" it looks. Some of the most important minutes we've ever received were filmed sideways on a phone with 4% battery left.
Why the best questions are the ones you'd never normally ask over dinner — and how to sit with the silences.
Families rarely interview each other. There's an unspoken agreement to keep conversation light, familiar, safe — which is lovely for a Sunday roast and terrible for actually finding out who someone is.
The questions that open people up are usually the ones that feel slightly too direct: What are you proudest of? What do you wish you'd said to someone? What do you hope people remember, and what do you hope they forget? Expect silence after questions like these. Don't fill it. The silence is usually where the real answer is being assembled.