When I was a teenager, my uncle showed me an old photo (c. 1930) of the Okamotos– my grandpa, grandma, aunties, uncles, and my mom.

I borrowed the photo and copied it, using a camera close at hand with low quality film. The out come wasn’t too good– the original photo had severe cracks and the copy turned out with terrible granular noises all over– but it still managed to retain the folks’ images.

I returned the original to my uncle, and have never seen it anymore. I once asked him if I could copy the photo again, this time in better quality. The one he showed me was the very copy I had given him along with the original print. Now the uncle is too old and perhaps cannot remember where he put the old photo away.

My mom, the youngest of the three daughters,  loved the photo because it showed each of her family members so nicely, so that I retouched the cracks, blew up and made a photo panel of it for her. She’d put that on a shelf of her bedroom. When she died, I put the paneled family photo in her casket at the funeral before cremation.

I regret not having done a better job in the first place…