Living only a block away it was a rarity if I didn't see or talk to my grandparents everyday. With each year I grew, the closer we became. When I moved out of the province for university handwritten letters poured in and we started our weekly tradition of Sunday night phone calls. We talked about everything and anything. She continuously pushed me to follow my creative ventures, read all my poetry, used my stories as coffee table books, hung my pictures on her bedroom wall and told me time after time
never to give up.

Every school year, my grandparents made the trip to come visit me for a couple of weeks. When I wasn't in class - I was with them. Friends were shocked they would travel all the way and then even more shocked that I wanted to spend so much time with them. Truth was, some of my favourite memories are just of us talking for hours in the hotel bar, hearing the same stories I was told throughout my life but somehow they were all different.

After University, I moved back to Ontario - I spoiled her rotten and she spoiled me. We celebrated our 25th, 26th, 80th, 81st. Then like an alarm clock buzzing in the morning, time simply ran out.

There was an arthritic tumor growing and pressing on her spine. She left home for the hospital and then the hospital for the palliative care unit. Her body began to wilt away more and more each day. Life became blurred. I travelled home every weekend at first to sneak in ice-cream, tell stories - and then to hold back tears, hold her hand.

Without a camera, I instinctively started to take photographs of her. She was beautiful. The standing fan blew her white hair off of her lovely face. Her bluest of blue eyes were deep of memories and angels crashing into her all at once. Her arthritis clinched hands were now relaxed and elegant - she'd like to know that.

Within those short two months we received three phone calls telling us we needed to say our goodbyes. Her breathing was loud and then went soft, too soft. She wouldn't sleep, wouldn't take her eyes off of us; off of her husband of 60 years, her 3 children, her grandchildren. She didn't stop fighting. She smiled when I entered the room, when any of us entered the room. She found the strength to say 'more' when I left. I captured her wink as I walked back into the room after crying in the hallway with a nurse. That wink, was my last and most powerful photograph I'd take of her.

My Nana, a beautiful, inspiring, wonderful lady was stuck in an insubstantial body - but she had her love, her heart and she used them until the very end. Two days before our next visit, the phone rang.

As I write this a year has just passed. There is still ringing - the wounds still fresh. An older woman humming in the bookstore, her favourite chocolates piled high in the grocery store, Sunday nights... It took me a while to accept that physically she is gone - no form, no body, no voice. But there are the unexplained moments when I feel her near, all our memories, her keepsakes, stories she told and in photographs.

In the swaying that surrounded us after she passed; I landed - right in the middle of my grandparent's living room amongst their abundance of photo albums. I looked at them like I had never seen them before. I sat with the photos as if I was sitting on the couch next to her, happy just simply listening to her stories.

After a couple of days - I began to separate my favorite photos, analyze them placing them in different piles - searching for the ones that made me feel, that showed me my Nana - natural, un-posed - just the way she was when I would stop by. The pile was small and even smaller when it came to photos of us together. Reality resurfaced.

Life has a funny way of knocking the wind out from within you and then filling your lungs with fresh air you have never tasted before. For the first time, I saw the power a photograph can hold. How it has the magical ability to freeze moments in time that are still alive within us. I realized how I could tell the stories I had in me, but I understood how to capture the stories around me, the small things that happen every day - the real things. My passion to tell stories I carried with me all my life could finally be used to help others - to capture their stories, the unscripted, naturalists of moments with their loved ones and to create tangible traces for them to cherish forever(more).

I believe everyone has a story. Thank you for reading mine.