What’s the last photo on your phone? Is it a meme? Is it a photo you asked someone to take, while the other participants grumbled, snarling about how they don’t like their picture taken? But you just went along ignoring their comments and poking them to smile and doing what you do? Are you the one who grumbles and snarls?

If so, I hope you’ll stop it.

I bet you have lots of people who love you, and who you love too. If anything ever happened to you, you’d want them to carry their good, loving, happy memories of you with them. That’s what photos do. They’re the reminders of moments our brain might have indexed so deep, we wouldn’t be able to access them otherwise.

On Thursday March 26^th my second oldest brother died. It was unexpected, a shock, and left our family in tears. His three girls now must face the world without their wonderful father, and my sister-in-law will raise them without her witty, intelligent and hardworking husband by her side.

I am the baby of the family, 12 years younger than my brother Thomas. Our lives have been quite different for some time, his home in Canada with his wife and three girls; me in Oregon married and chasing writing and riding and travel dreams. But you never really outgrow birth order roles. I followed my brother Daniel’s recommendation to reach out to Tom to discuss some personal struggles I was dealing with. I didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to talk about my hardship. Felt embarrassed and guilty and conflicted. But Dan encouraged me to call.

So I called.

And in the last few months we had some pretty heavy conversations with a depth and honesty we wouldn’t have had if I wasn’t facing what I was. If not for those conversations, all I would have left are some text messages and the very last photo I have of four of us siblings together. My sister couldn’t make it.

We had descended on my brother Dan’s house in St. Louis last March to celebrate his pending retirement from the military. He’s a pilot and took us up into a TINY three-seater plane that gave me the shakes. We toured the Budweiser Brewery, walked around the arch, and they all humored me and took me to a western store. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was Thomas who bought a hat and I left emptyhanded. I wish I could remember.

But the very last photo, I do remember what we were doing there. We were just watching TV together, all laid out in the same fashion, cut from the same cloth. I thought it was funny and I asked my dad to take a photo. And then we were all kind of chuckling at my father trying to figure out how to take a photo on my iPhone. With that click, this is the very last photo I have with my brother Thomas.

Thomas never grumbled about being in photos. He was pretty easy-going and up for having a good time. I’m so glad for that very last photo. It’s not the most touching or beautiful and I’m really the only one smiling. But it reminds me of how relaxed we all were, what a good weekend we had together.