Parents like me avail ourselves of every opportunity to photograph our children, particularly at all of the relevant firsts—smile, tooth, haircut, Christmas, birthday. As our kids grow older and milestones grow farther apart (and our presence with the Canon PowerShot grows more embarrassing), we limit the photo ops to yearly obligations, or as my friend and neighbor Pam called them, “traditions!” She announced photo sessions with a smile and a corny wink, but her firmly set jaw warned even the surliest preteens that compliance was not optional.

We knew we’d miss the children one day, when they left our street for college, jobs, and families of their own; too late we realized how much we would miss the grownups, too.

On January 30, 2013, fourteen months after she was diagnosed with brain cancer, my friend Pam passed away. In the days that followed her death, I spent hours combing through thousands of photos in an increasingly desperate drive to see her again, especially as I remembered her before radiation burned her scalp and medication distorted her face.

I wanted to hold a picture of her smile, broadening as I walked nearer to the bus stop outside her front door. I wanted to watch that smile harden into a grimace when she learned that another member of the block’s Girl Scout troop snatched up my quota of Thin Mints for the year. I wanted her glow of relief when she saw that I wouldn’t leave her alone with Hank, the sweat-stained dad who meant well but said “shit” in front of the grade schoolers a few too many times. I wanted tangible evidence of her smirk as she shared news about a neighbor’s wife leaving in the middle of the night, screaming obscenities and taking the dog. She loved gossip almost as much as she loved photography.

Pam took traditions, and their documentation, extremely seriously. Every year she shot SD cards full of the first and last days of school, Halloween costumes, National Night Out parties, and all manner of annual activities (snowman building, mud puddle splashing, sprinkler dashing, leaf-pile destroying) that marked the passage of time on our block in south Minneapolis.  

In picture after picture, Pam’s two daughters smile, and occasionally grimace, beside my own son and daughter and up to a dozen other squirrelly children. We parents told ourselves that these pictures, hundreds and hundreds of them, could offer a glimmer hope in our futile effort to slow down our kids’ race towards adulthood. After all, we said every September, wasn’t it only yesterday that Kelcy loved Elmo more than One Direction? That Miriam rode a tricycle? That Campbell had two front teeth?  

If Pam appeared in a photo at all, she was looking away from the camera, spooning a sticky pile of macaroni and cheese onto a child’s paper plate. Occasionally she’d be captured in conversation with another parent, her face contorted mid-sentence, her eyes blazing red from the camera’s flash or closed entirely. Her voice snarks in my ear, disparaging that woman’s awkwardness, begging for a better, more glamorous way to be remembered.

Adults can usually be relied upon to photograph one another on birthdays and major holidays, especially when a member of the family is euphemistically referred to as “getting up there.” We too easily forget the people who fill in the days in between, the friends and neighbors, those who are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it takes a deep, irreparable tear for us to realize how bound together we really are.

From September 2005, when our oldest children entered kindergarten, until November 2011, when she was admitted to the ER, I saw Pam every weekday at seven am and two pm, congregating at the bus stop long after our jittery kindergarteners needed our presence. I never photographed Pam while we gossiped, complained about mitten-losing children and husbands who rarely cooked dinner, or moaned about mercurial Minnesota weather. I didn’t think to document the quiet moments on which our friendship was built.

My daughter is in her last year of elementary school, a fourth grader who does not need me to join her at the corner of East 49th Street. Yet I walk down to the end of the block every day, in a ritual that I both cherish and resent.

Sometimes I stare the back door of Pam’s house and imagine her stumbling out, running fingers through gray-rooted ash blonde hair, pushing her toes through her daughter’s pink-flowered flip flops in her haste to meet the bus on time. We would talk of the volunteering for Field Day or who’s going home on that night’s episode of “American Idol.” Why didn’t I take a picture then?

The uncomfortable truth I confront as I flip through thousands of pictures is that permanence is an illusion; neither digital file nor 4×6 slip of Kodak paper can reanimate the people we love. Pam’s own scrapbooks, displayed at her memorial service, did little to heal her mourners’ grief—and in those pictures, carefully curated by the woman herself, she looked flawless, with every hair in place, every smile relaxed and genuine.

She is perfect; she is gone.

If our lives unfold as planned, my last walk to greet the elementary school bus will occur on a warm afternoon this June. I’ll have a camera in my hand, Kleenex in my pocket, and a bit of the wisdom that is earned from grief. I expect my hair will be a mess, but my smile will be exquisite as I ask my daughter to take a picture…of me.

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