The Shoot

The photographer came today, this super nice, compassionate, kind man who had been sent by the newspaper to capture me and my family (but of course not my eldest daughter, who is obviously not fit to print in their paper.) But this was not Chris's fault; in fact he was very thoughtful in trying to help me think of the best way to capture our family sitting around our special Charlotte garden. At the time of day he arrived, the light was waning and the shadows were theoretically all wrong for doing the shoot at the garden. I explained it to him very frankly.
"I really wanted to have my daughter in the photograph, the one who died," I told him, "but whoever is in charge of the article wouldn't let that happen. Honestly I'm pretty upset about that, and it's really important to me that whatever we figure out for the shoot, she is somehow in it". I showed him the garden with the angel statue and he got all sorts of gear out of his car, "Oh, it's possible, we'll make it work," he said.
While Greg was upstairs getting our kids Charlotte t-shirts on them Chris was careful to write down all of our names and to get the spelling of Charlotte's name, too. He wrote down exactly what I wanted him to say, that pictured here were the four members of the family sitting in the memorial garden for their daughter Charlotte Amelia, who died in 2003.
So we sat, and we smiled like the happy family that we are. Chris made faces for the kids and they laughed (when they weren't complaining to go back and play some more) and he snapped away. After a time his face furrowed, and he worried that he wasn't getting enough of the garden into the shot. "Do you have a stepladder?" he asked. We did, and up on the ladder he captured the family and the garden surrounding us, with the angel and the tiny rabbit and the pretty purple crocuses (and a lot of old dead perennials mowed down to nubbins, thank you early spring in Massachusetts). I wonder how the photos will look, if you will be able to read the writing on our shirts, if the angel will be visible, if the caption will say what I hope it will.
But for now, I am glad that even without the photo, about which I am still bullshit, I feel we created a Charlotte-centered photograph. I hope others will be able to see that.