Four years ago I wrote a Remembrance Day blog post about one of my clients – Joyce – that touched SO many of you I lost count of the people who got in touch with me.
It was about one of us – a Mum.
But a Mum who had lost her son, JJ, in Afghanistan.
Something Joyce said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph resonated with so many of you:-
‘Had JJ been my only child, I would have gone to the grave with him. But I have three other children; I didn’t want them to think I died on the day JJ did’
And I think everyone of us – in our own heartbroken way – totally got that.
When JJ was killed in 2008 his sister, Honey, was just a little dot.
12 months later – on what would have been JJ’s 21st Birthday, I posted a picture and you would have all probably missed her….. the little red-head in Mummies arms
The little red-headed dot whose very world had been turned upside down and who was way too young to understand
And a few years later you would have probably missed her again – this time in her big sisters arms.
Never realising she was JJ’s sister. That she’d lost her big brother.
Because that’s what happens. We remember the fallen and sometimes forget that there are little sisters, and big sisters, and brothers, and Mums, and Dads, and Grandma’s and whole families that have fallen too.
And who have to pick themselves up and somehow carry on.
As we approach another Remembrance Sunday I am sitting quietly editing portraits of that little girl who, along with the rest of her family, picked herself up and carried on. JJ’s Little Sister, Honey, who I had the absolute HONOR of photographing last week.
And as I sit here….wondering where the years have gone…..in my head I can hear the words of the poet John Maxwell Edmonds:-
“When you go home, tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow, we gave our today.”
And I look at that little red headed dot on the screen in front of me and thank every one of them for the tomorrows we have ALL been given.
The original blog post about Joyce and JJ’s Memorial Fund can be found at Lest We Forget
For details of Portrait sittings for Sisters and all other sorts of family members just drop me a line below and I’ll send you the latest “The Story of Us” Brochure