Lighting Up Faces On This Side Of Beauty

A young colleague passed away this week after needing emergency medical help in the office. His wife is well known to many of my co-workers. They have two young sons.

It’s not about us, of course. It’s about this young man’s family and their long climb through this shocking loss. Still, his death has left those who knew him closely, those who knew him not so closely, and those who cared for him in his final hours … piecing together what it means to say goodbye to a bright, creative, and compassionate colleague when we’ll never actually have the opportunity to say goodbye.

You’ll notice the collage of faces pasted at the top of this post. Every member of our firm, from assistant to founder, is part of a much larger collage on our company website. It’s found in a section labeled “Team.” My late colleague took many if not most of these photographs.

I really like the fact that these images are a part of his legacy — not just because these visual elements continue on as key parts of our firm’s website, but because of what each of these visual elements represent.

Each photograph represents an intimate moment, however awkward or anxious or orchestrated or stressful or joyful or easygoing or funny, when the subject turned their attention and their face to my colleague behind his camera … and, click, the moment is preserved forever. A colleague’s lit-up face is what we see in the picture, but my late colleague is there too. On this side of the camera. Doing his job. In a bright, creative, and compassionate way.

I seem to find great comfort in simply staring at these photos of my colleagues — and seeing my late colleague there, too.

One last thing:

The image pasted below is a doctored photo of a street light seen through the branches of an oak tree. I took the original photo during a late-night neighborhood walk with my dog, a few hours after my colleague passed away.

I stared up in the dark at the beauty on the other side of my camera, took my shot … and realized the moment was probably my way of saying goodbye to a colleague who’d done the same with me in his viewfinder.