If there’s one thing that I’ve heard more often than not, it’s that life moves by way too fast. One second all your loved ones are telling stories in the family room and the next there is one less laugh in the din of sound. All we have are memories, but there’s a problem with this: the more we try to remember and relive the past, the more likely we are to forget.

It’s a cruel reality that as we try to hold onto something, it is simultaneously being torn away from us. As much as we want to remember our time with loved ones from back in our past, a lot of the time, our brains have already replaced those times with new ones. The past becomes fuzzy, and the little details disappear. For me, I wonder why my memory decided long ago that some voices and smiles were not important enough for me to keep. It’s awful because those people are the ones who anxiously awaited my birth, tried to make me laugh, cradled me close to their chests. How is it fair that they gave me so much love, and I can’t even give them the courtesy of having a mental picture in my memory? Then there are those who I remember in bursts, in smells like a whiff a unique vanilla perfume or sounds like hearing “Landslide” on the radio, but never stick around for long. I’m not sure which is more painful.

Luckily, the one thing that forever keeps their memory alive are photographs. I am extremely grateful for my parents for carrying their Kodaks around (you know, the chunky rectangles that came before smartphones and digital cameras). Now I have hundreds of photos of those people to keep their memory alive. These pictures are the baselines for storytelling and the cause for reminiscing about “the good ole days.” Talking with my parents and grandparents, I sit and listen about the times that I’ve never heard and then join in on the ones I remember myself.

We all long for what will never return, and photographs allow us to escape to relive moments for a short period of time until reality reels us back. They allow us to re-experience emotions that are depicted in those pictures, but only until we flip the page. Tears may leak from our eyes and dot the pages, but that’s ok. Those tears hold love and nostalgia for those we can no longer laugh at, talk to, hug, or kiss.

Although we miss people terribly, whether reminded of them by a movie that they adored or one of their catchphrases said out of nowhere, we will never forget them. One of the only way to forget the stories and their faces in the future is to lose the photos, but with the help of photo albums, Tupperware containers, and technology, this will never happen. It’s weird to think that someone so special to us in the present will become less relevant to the generations to come. They will just be a name and biography, but to us, they are everything. Hopefully the photos give those future generations the idea of how amazing their ancestors were and lead them to ask questions to keep their spirits alive.

Everyone has those people who they wish could still be with them, those people could even be living but time has made them strangers, however, pictures will always be there if we need to take a moment and reflect. May their laughs ring in our ears and their smiles remain etched in our memories. If not, let our photographs feed our souls and forever remember them as if they never left. Love can never be erased, and through love we live.