Last week I flew to California to attend the funeral of my Uncle Chris, who married my mom's baby sister almost 20 years ago. After a relatively short battle with pancreatic cancer, he was called back home. The service was beautiful, and the "life sketch" (Mormon speak for "eulogy") described him perfectly. My aunt fretted that the task was too big—the summing up of a person's entire life—but the words shared that day captured the very essence of him.
When you look at other souls with the intention of discovering the heart of who they are, the human frailties and weaknesses that afflict us all dissolve from view. Chris looked at everyone this way, every day of his life. When the same lens was turned on him in the life sketch, we all saw a gentle, non-judgmental soul who had the rare gift of loving other people unconditionally. This sentence doesn't come close to describing everything about his life, but it does describe who he was.
My little sister and I took on the task of preparing the photo display for the funeral. My aunt wanted a digital frame playing a series of photos from his life. So a whole crew of relatives sat and sifted through 15 family photo albums, flagging potential pictures. We helped my aunt narrow them down to the ones that would go in the frame, and then my sister and I headed to Target to scan the lot of them. Here are a few highlights:
I do not write this to put yet another extended Hill-Lucas 2009 family trial on display, but to honor a precious life that has passed. And to remind my readers (the vast majority of whom are scrapbookers) that these skills we're all cultivating can be so useful, even essential, in other areas of our lives. We try to capture the essence of a story or a person in layout form all the time. We know how to narrow down countless photos to just those that tell the right stories. We're no strangers to the act of scanning and organizing photographs. And it's a great thing when we can use these abilities to help ease a friend or loved one's overwhelming burden just a teeny tiny bit, at a time like this.
(Helpful tip: some Target photo centers have Kodak batch-scanning kiosks that allow you to place up to 20 photos in a tray, and they're fed through and scanned one by one, at 300 dpi and saved to their original finished size. No lining photos up on a flat-bed and then cropping them out individually. The scans weren't perfect, but they were absolutely good enough to display in a digital frame, and we couldn't have done it any other way under the time line.)
