Sorting through Amy’s photos

I spent a few hours today looking through boxes of my sister Amy’s photos. I boxed them up two years ago when my older sisters and I packed up her house after her death. I hadn’t looked at them since. What made me open the boxes today was that I realized that my oldest sister’s 60th birthday is Tuesday and I wanted to do a birthday salute to her. I wanted to know what pictures Amy had of sister #1 that I didn’t have.

I didn’t realize then that I would instead write this tribute to Amy. This is the sort of thing I will be writing about–how photographs capture the soul not in the manner that indigenous tribes felt that they would, but capture the soul of the person viewing the image. My soul was captured today in seeing Amy’s life in pictures.

Amy was eight years younger than me, ten years younger than L and fourteen years younger than the oldest Goodwin girl. She died in Austin, TX on January 2, 2006. She was found dead of natural causes, in bed, on January 6th after she didn’t show up at her 10 year sobriety anniversary. She had moved to Austin three months earlier after spending her life–including college and law school–in San Diego.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Amy. Two weeks ago I interviewed for a job at NOLO Press for sales of their attorney search and realized that while it wasn’t the ideal job for me, it would have been the perfect job for Amy-

• doing sales, which she as extremely good at
• to lawyers, which she was–although she hadn’t practiced law in years she remained a member of the CA bar
• for a publisher, what she had been trying to do for over a year

Amy was a writer. She wrote Lesbian romance novels. I don’t know if that’s an actual category, but that’s how I’d classify them. She posted them on a few websites and had a strong following. When she was sixteen she outed herself by leaving her journal on the coffee table and telling my parents to read it.

She had been a lawyer and had worked for Mail Boxes, Etc., but after winning a major case for them she was laid off. She then ran my parents’ camera store that specialized in used cameras. Her job transition came at the same time as her sobriety. She attached herself to Goodwin Photo and our parents. She was so attached that when she moved to Austin she packed the whole store and spent $10,000 on the move. We sold everything to a company that purchases used cameras for $4,000 and they packed and transported it all.

This picture was taken when Amy was in her early teens the day she had her wisdom teeth removed. At her memorial it received the most ahs. I took the photo without a flash, with the camera on the table, using Kodachrome^TM. I had to do a lot of doctoring using Adobe Photoshop Elements.

She wasn’t a photographer. The pictures were taken by others. What captured my soul today was seeing Amy’s life-really looking at it and sensing it. Seeing her opening Christmas presents with her former partner Denise, being at parties, the inside of her home, and her vacations. This is the side of her that I didn’t necessarily know, just as my sisters and I didn’t know until after her death that she smoked a pack a day. I had never been inside of her house. She wouldn’t let me in–even when I stopped at her house after driving five hundred miles–because it would reveal that she smoked.

I also saw what was important to her. Family was important. She had photos of Ls son Aa at birth and photos of his two daughters. There were pictures of me that I had never seen before and pictures of the family that weren’t in the photos I went through after my father died. Her great love was her cats and our family cat Pasha in particular. They were all there.

I tossed pictures of people I didn’t recognize when I packed up the boxes. What remained amounted to a few hundred pictures–a significant number to look at and to capture my soul.