A personal reflection on memory, loss, and the stories that fade when those who lived them are gone. Sorting through decades of unlabelled family photos, I search for faces, places, and the fragments of my mother’s life—piecing together what I can, and imagining the rest.

On the fifth anniversary of my father’s death, I reflect on how meaning and memory are carried through the rituals we choose to create. Prompted by a conversation about family traditions, she considers the quiet importance of remembrance and the ways we keep those we love present in the life that continues after them.

In this first reflection in The Remembering Project, I consider the quiet power of photographs and the way they act as gateways to memory. An old image from childhood becomes a portal — allowing me to revisit a moment in time and reconsider the complexity of the man at the centre of it.