{"id":476429,"date":"2026-03-15T05:25:23","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T05:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/476429\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T05:25:23","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T05:25:23","slug":"every-picture-tells-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/476429\/","title":{"rendered":"Every Picture Tells a Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some parents find it too painful to look at old photos of their child who died.<\/a> I felt the opposite. Going down memory<\/a> lane and seeing photos of Rob as a kid and as an adult kept me connected to him, and that\u2019s what I needed the most in the first few months after his death.<\/p>\n

If that\u2019s not what you need the most, I get it, but I\u2019d still suggest looking at a photo or two every now and then. Viewing old photos is like time traveling. There\u2019s your child, growing up right before your eyes, until it stops before it\u2019s supposed to stop. It\u2019s heartbreaking, I know, and the anguish can be too much to bear, but if you can somehow stick with it, a bittersweet joy <\/a>eventually arises from these photographic ashes.<\/p>\n

At least that was the way it worked for me. I\u2019d often start my tour at the top of the stairs with my all-time favorite photo\u2014a framed poster-sized picture of me and the kids in our backyard when we lived in Long Island. It was taken for a story about having testicular cancer that I wrote for GQ more than 40 years ago. Zach\u2019s wearing an Allan Houston Knicks jersey and Rob\u2019s wearing a rare Michael Jordan Bulls jersey (45 was his number when he returned to Chicago after playing baseball). We\u2019re all barefoot, which I always thought was such a sweet touch. It\u2019s the most beautiful photo of the three of us ever taken, and looking at it made me sadder<\/a> than any other photo in the house.<\/p>\n

Hanging on another wall upstairs is a picture we called \u201cThe Menendez Brothers.\u201d It was also taken in our backyard, right around the time the real Menendez brothers were convicted of murdering their parents. Both kids (maybe they were three and four) wear black sweatshirts and sport identical \u201cdeer in the headlights\u201d looks.<\/p>\n

Downstairs on the first floor is the photo that accompanied the first Esquire story<\/a> I wrote about Robbie. That\u2019s the one I look at\u2014and talk to\u2014most often, as it sits right across from our dining room table, where I\u2019m routinely parked at my laptop. It\u2019s the only portrait that captures who Rob was on the inside, and that\u2019s why I took it out of storage after he died.<\/p>\n

I used to have it hanging on a wall in my old apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But then a feng shui expert came to my place and noted that none of the photos of my kids showed them smiling, something that had never occurred to me. I just thought the pictures were beautiful and kind of sophisticated.<\/p>\n

Taking her advice to heart, I replaced them with \u201chappier\u201d snapshots, and those are the photos that came to sit on my bookcase in Los Angeles. On the top shelf is one of Rob and Zach, taken on Zach\u2019s eighteenth birthday. His presents included a skydiving jump and his first tattoo, and I remember all of us having such a great time that day.<\/p>\n

Just below that photo is another all-time favorite, a shot of the two of them as teenagers<\/a>. I must\u2019ve somehow made them laugh, because their smiles are so big and genuine that you can feel how much they love each other. Zach prized this pic so much that he got a tattoo of it on his back several years before Rob died. We all used to joke about how the tattoo artist didn\u2019t do such a hot job in the likeness department, making both kids look\u2014how should I put this?\u2014mentally challenged. But Zach finally had another artist touch it up and now it looks exactly like the original photo.<\/p>\n

On the next shelf is a shot of the kids taken for my birthday. Rob is holding a sign that says, \u201cHappy Birthday,\u201d and Zach\u2019s sign says, \u201cDaddy We Love You.<\/a>\u201d They must\u2019ve been four or five and both are wearing party hats.<\/p>\n

On the bottom shelf is another all-time fave, and I know I keep repeating that phrase but isn\u2019t that what we do? It\u2019s not like I\u2019m going to hang photos of Rob having a meltdown at Disney World! This beauty shows my father-in-law, Marty, holding Rob\u2019s little hands while he\u2019s standing in Marty\u2019s lap. This is right around Rob\u2019s first birthday, and he\u2019s smiling at the camera while Marty is smiling hard at his grandson. It captures a moment of pure joy that, years later, has turned to irrevocable sadness because both of these two people I loved so dearly are no longer with us.<\/p>\n

Yet there\u2019s something sweet about that sadness: a reminder of the depth of the connection<\/a> that I felt\u2014and continue to feel\u2014with Rob.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some parents find it too painful to look at old photos of their child who died. I felt…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-476429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}