My mother never liked photos.
She said cameras steal a little piece of your soul. So for sixty years, she avoided them. Every family picture, she was either cooking, or turning away, or saying "not now."
When she passed, we had nothing to put on the wall.
My brother searched her old trunk. Inside were letters, receipts, a rosary, but no portrait. The funeral printer kept calling: "You need a framed photo for the service."
I remembered her small garden behind the house. She spent every evening there, talking to her tomatoes as if they were children.
One afternoon, months before she died, I had secretly taken a picture of her there. She was wearing her faded blue wrapper, her hands full of soil, laughing at something. The sun was hitting her face. She didn't know I was watching.
It wasn't perfect. Her eyes were half closed from the sun. Her wrapper was dirty.
But it was her. Fully alive.
We framed it. Big wooden frame, gold edges.
At the funeral, people stopped in front of it. They didn't say "sorry for your loss." They said "this is exactly how she was."
Now it hangs in my living room. Not a sad funeral photo. A woman in her gardeen, caugght in lighht.
I used to think framingg a picture meant keepingg someone still foreveer.
Now I know it means you finally let them be seen,___exactly as they lived.
IMAGE IS AI GENERATED