Smiles and tears at a history in pictures

ANYONE who has embarked on the job of clearing a house after the death of loved ones will know that it's the emotional strain that hurts much more than the pulled muscles from shifting the furniture.

- PHILIP BOWERN

My sister and I have made a first tentative foray into clearing our parents' flat, following their deaths, just weeks apart, in December and January. Progress was slow and perhaps, in retrospect, it was a mistake to start with the photograph albums.

For those lucky enough to have parents who confined themselves to a wedding album and a few snaps of holidays, it might seem odd that we chose to prioritise sorting out the photographs, but our Dad was an early exponent of the Box Brownie, graduating to bigger and better cameras as technology improved.

While he would never have claimed to be anything other than a taker of snaps, he did like to record life and then have it printed, first in black and white, and then in the garish colours popular with the photographic labs of the 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond. As a result, when my sister and I first opened the cupboards following his death in January, just over three weeks after our mother passed away, in late December, we found them bulging with albums, along with boxes and boxes of photographs that hadn't quite made the cut.

We knew if we didn't crack on with sorting, selecting and - yes - disposing of some of those photographs, the thought of what to do with them would hang heavy over the whole process of clearing the flat.