When I first began seriously thinking about marrying my wife Debi, I remember asking her, “how many kids do you want to have?”
“Ten,” was her response. I stared hard into those green eyes, chuckled and then realized she was serious. “Gulp - ok, well, ten it is!” Both of us came from larger mixed families and both loved children. So here was one dream that would be easy to make happen - plenty
of time…or so I thought. Six years into our marriage we were still waiting for our first child. Each year she suffered one miscarriage. We saw doctors, sought help, but could not figure out why she could not have a healthy baby. In year seven, we found out we were pregnant again, and of course like prior times, we did not get our hopes up – assuming this would end shortly like our previous attempts, but also secretly believing for better. We made it to 10 weeks, then 11, 12 and finally thought, this is it!! After so many losses, the bitter turned to sweet and we anxiously awaited bringing this child into our family. At 18 weeks, we went to the doctor’s for a regular appointment. It began with an ultrasound. Nothing seemed unusual at first as the typically happy tech smiled, made jokes and showed us our wonderfully alive baby. The atmosphere in the room gradually changed as the ultrasound began to extend past its normal 15-20 mins. The tech became quiet and focused. Debi looked at me, and silently said, “something is very wrong.”
After an hour of being in the room, our tears of joy became tears of confusion and concern. We returned to the office immediately to see our doctor. She briskly entered the room, closed the door and did not sit down. She wasted no time trying to soften the news she was about to deliver, but flatly said, “I don’t know if your baby is viable.”
For the next 15 weeks, we had a new home in Crouse hospital in Syracuse. Our new doctor informed us of a rare genetic disorder, Meckel-Gruber, that affected the development of the kidneys, which in turn affected the development of the lungs as little fluid would be present. As long as this precious baby was in her mother’s womb, she would live. The moment she was born, her life here - would end. My wife asked calmly, “is the baby is any pain?”
“No.” was the doctor’s reply. “A mother’s womb is the safest place in the world for any child,” she said, with her steely-calm and reassuring words, which are still with us to this day. The baby came at 33 weeks. She lived briefly and then died. She was born on Valentine’s day, and was aptly named Jubilee Valentine. Surrounded by family and friends, we said our goodbyes for now. Over the following year, we spent our days in grief. Tears became our food and sorrow became our friend. The chances of having a baby with the syndrome were low. We struggled. We decided to try again. One year later, we were pregnant again. This time there was anxious excitement as we rushed along the weeks to get to testing whether or not the baby would have the syndrome. We were told that technology had advanced and they could tell earlier now. We went in at 13 weeks….no sign of the syndrome. They told us we were in the clear. We sang, we danced, we cried. We bought clothes, cribs and began preparations immediately. Two weeks later, we were back at the hospital to check on the baby. A tech fumbled around looking for the on switch of the ultrasound machine. I helped her locate it. She began the exam which only lasted moments. She excused herself quickly to get the doctor.
“That’s weird,” I thought. “Perhaps she doesn’t know how to use the machine.”
The doctor entered the room with the tech and both stood in front of us. Neither said a word for several moments. The doctor finally opened with, “I’m so sorry.”
“Sorry for what?!” I said with confusion.
“The syndrome.”
I don’t believe there are sufficient words in our language to quite describe what it feels like to lose more than one living child, back to back.
13 weeks later, she came. Juda Elizabeth. Before we let her go, I read a book to her – the same book that I had read to her every night since. This would be the last time she would her my voice in this world. Promises were made, goodbyes for now were sent. Our family and friends surrounded us. At Juda’s birth we had used our own camera to take pictures of her and remember her by. It was my wife’s professional camera and on that machine was the recorded history of her brief life. Others took photos and videos as well which we were very thankful for. A few weeks later, that same camera was in our car as we were visiting family. We had never taken the photos off the camera. It was just too difficult at that time to go through them, and save them. We thought the car was locked. Later the next day I noticed the camera was missing. After lots of questions we realized it had been stolen. We were devastated. This was the beginning for me - realizing a problem that we have today. “Why didn’t I just print the pictures? Why didn’t I just take the time and deal with them? Before smartphones and digital cameras, I never would have let this go.” I began thinking about all of the precious memories I had stored on my smartphones and how I had never organized or printed them. I began to think about how people are not documenting their lives anymore because it’s just too easy to snap thousands of pictures on phones. Time passed, and we found ourselves two years later once again ready to bring a baby into the world. This time it was a boy, a healthy boy. After ten losses, we were able to rejoice in the precious gift that we could take home with us. Over the next few weeks, I became the main photographer snapping up all the precious moments of those early times. I took so many pictures that I began to run out of space. I decided to transfer about 3,000 pictures over to google photos to free up some space on my phone. Because I double check everything, I checked the first picture and the last picture to make sure they transferred over ok. Yup, I was good! A month later, my wife asked me to pull up Marty’s birth pictures and early weeks pictures so she could start printing them. I said, “no problem!” feeling all the feelings that a proud husband would feel, knowing that he secured these precious memories. I went to my google photos and scrolled to the middle section by date, looking for this group of photos. I couldn’t find them right away, so I thought, well I’ll just scroll through all of the pictures. After about an hour or so of looking, I determined that there were about 3 months of photos missing from my download, and yep, guess which timeframe was included in those three months – Marty’s birth in the hospital and early weeks at home. For weeks, I worked on solutions on how to extract deleted pictures from Iphones, phone calls, research and more research. Finally I submitted to the fact that they were just gone. Now, thankfully we had pictures from other family and friends, but these were special. These were moments and memories from our family celebrating his life. That was all the evidence I needed to finish my theory on what has happened to humans and photographs since the invention of the smart phone. Human behavior towards photography has tragically shifted from 20 years ago. Do you have an album with your grandmothers handwriting in it? Do you consider that to be one of your prized possessions? If your home burned down, and everyone was ok, what would be your next concern? Your keepsake photos right? In our day and age, it’s soooo easy to snap away thousands of pictures but we are losing the meaning and the power of a photographed memory. We would never take our prized photo albums to the bathroom with us, and yet we take our cell phones with all of our memories there. We have devices with thousands of photos that are easily stored on shelves in our homes. When a new phone is needed, we simply buy one and send an empty promise to our old phones - “I’ll be back to take care of you.”
Or worse yet, we are taking pictures by the thousands and dumping them into cloud accounts, with the empty promise of, “I’ll take care of those later.”
We are on the precipice of a complete digital hoarders mess. It’s time to get your digital life in order! We need a solution. At first, I thought there must be something out there that can help you sort pictures before printing or uploading to the cloud? I mean, there’s thousands of photo solutions right? I began to dig around and after a few years of research, to my great surprise, there is NO tool that helps a smartphone user quickly sort out the best pics to delete, save, print or send to social media! We can’t get our memories back. They’re gone. BUT, perhaps I could help someone else. I created Locket in the hopes of making a solution where no one would have to experience this type of loss ever again. What if there were a way to simply sort and print the pictures on your smart phones? What if breaking your phone, or losing your phone didn’t matter, because you’ve already taken care of your precious memories? SO….how does it work?? Open the app, sign up, close the app. Snap away! Go on vacation, or have a birthday party, or graduation. Then open the app when youre ready and all of your recent photos are automatically brought into the app. Now, here comes the fun part. Swipe LEFT on the picture to delete, swipe RIGHT to save to the cloud, and swipe UP to send to your local Walgreens. You don’t pay anything until you show up at Walgreens to pick up your pictures. The name LOCKET refers to our valentines – love letters from God. We received them, we held them and then we returned them. What we have left now is our memories, our keepsakes. Would you give Locket a try today and start keeping your memories safe too?
