Loss 35/101: Loss of photos: Chris & Claire Sandys

#053. We've all done it haven't we? Lost, damaged or deleted important photos and videos with absolutely no way of retrieving them. There's that sinking feeling followed by a knot in your stomach as you realise what just happened. 

Loss #35 of 101 - Loss of photos

This is The Silent Why, a podcast on a mission to open up conversations around loss and grief and to see if hope can be found in 101 different types of loss.

This week, we (your hosts, Chris & Claire Sandys) are back to share a personal loss we went through last year. 

Damage to our back-up hard drive ended up with us losing thousands of photos from a four year period, including holidays of a lifetime, our 40th birthdays, a 100th birthday, special memories and many zoo animals.

As it's very important to us that ALL losses are covered in our 101 losses (not just bereavements), this week is an example of how the pain of grief can occur even in situations we might be likely to try and dismiss as a 'lesser loss' that we should just 'get over'. Yet all losses affect us and need processing, on any level.

Join us as we tell the story of what happened, how we've come to terms with it (if we have!) and why it's important to share these kinds of losses too. 

Transcript

Claire: 0:02

Hello everyone.

Chris: 0:03

Welcome to The Silent Why podcast.

Claire: 0:04

Here to talk about the losses that we all face in life, whether bereavements careers, dreams, abilities, identities, objects, you name it, you can probably lose it.

Chris: 0:12

We've set ourselves a mission of finding 101 different types of loss, chatting to people who've never experienced them... Which makes no sense!

Claire: 0:20

[laughs!]

Chris: 0:21

So I'll do that bit again. [finger click] Chatting to people who've experienced them to see if it's possible to find hope through every kind of grief.

Claire: 0:28

And today, you get me, Claire, and...

Chris: 0:30

On a different microphone setting, called Dark, it's Chris.

Claire: 0:34

And in this slightly shorter, but just as painful episode, we chat about Loss 35, the loss of photos, and the ongoing impact of this'accident'.

Chris: 0:43

Yeah, it broke my heart!

Claire: 0:45

One thing we were very keen on when we started this podcast was that we wanted to cover a whole breadth of losses, we want to encompass every type of permanent loss, something you can't get back again in the same way, was that was human life, or documentation or objects or memories, or even photos.

Chris: 1:02

podcast, it was important to us that we didn't create any sort of scale to imply that one loss is greater than another. Because so much of how a loss affects someone is related to who they are, where they are in life, what the thing they lost meant to them, for example.

Claire: 1:26

For one person losing a close family member is a heart stopping tragedy, but for another they might be pleased. These are two very different stories and experiences with the same loss. For one person losing a family hamster is something that makes them feel sad for about an hour before they move on and then buy another one. For a different person, it might be the end of the only company they had at home, and the impact of that same loss can be devastating to their whole year.

Chris: 1:48

But we're here to look at all losses and how they can affect us in very different ways, but also how we can all learn from each other, and the grieving process that follows whether that's a process that takes minutes, or days or weeks or months or years or decades.

Claire: 2:00

And today for this loss we're gonna start by setting the scene and telling you a story.

Chris: 2:07

[going back in time sound effect] Sort of whizz back second effect. In our house on the 13th of July 2021, it was a very average day, in a very average week, in a fairly average house in England.

Claire: 2:22

And I was going about my business ready to start podcast editing at home.

Chris: 2:26

I was minding my own business working from home already logged on to my work computer in the home office(well, the office at home, I don't work for the Home Office).

Claire: 2:35

And after a couple of nights away. The laptop that I was using was snugly in its laptop bag downstairs. And I needed to bring it upstairs to work in the podcast 'oom (see one of my previous blogs explained the name of that).

Chris: 2:45

Meanwhile, I was very busy working upstairs.

Claire: 2:48

I took hold of the laptop bag made sure it was zipped up, because if not the laptop might fall out. I'd like to point out at this point, there aren't many more people more conscientious than me when it comes to being careful. I've broken around five things in my life and I've never damaged, broken or lost a phone.

Chris: 3:04

Meanwhile, I was working very hard upstairs.

Claire: 3:07

As I pulled the bag from the table and held it by my side, bearing in mind I'm pretty short, something dropped out of the side zip pocket and fell onto the floor. It fell around 10 inches at most.

Chris: 3:17

Meanwhile, I may have been in a important meeting working very hard upstairs.

Claire: 3:21

Looking down, I noticed it was our external hard drive where we backup all the photos from my laptop. I didn't think much of it and there was no external damage, but I had to transfer some photos, so I sat down with a laptop and plugged it in, a little nervously but fairly confident all would be well.

Chris: 3:37

Meanwhile, I'd probably working very hard on the internet upstairs.

Claire: 3:40

When I plugged the hard drive in, it made a horrible whirring clunking sound and the computer didn't recognise the drivers being there. I tried a few times. But then remember that sometimes it can make it worse by letting it work around. So I unplugged it. And with a lump in my throat and a knot in my stomach. I made the slow journey upstairs.

Chris: 3:56

To the place where I was working very hard.

Claire: 3:59

After a lot of Googling and the pair of is trying to pretend that it will be okay. Our minds started to go over everything that we had put on that hard drive, namely all our photos, thousands of them. We thought it was a solid state drive, which meant a small drop wouldn't affect it. But it turns out - it wasn't. Unfortunately, we got into the habit of backing up our photos on there. But as our laptop got older, we started to delete them off the laptop to save space and memory. After an online chat with Seagate who made the drive, they very kindly helped to try and retrieve the stuff but then said they could actually collect it, analyse it in their lab in the Netherlands where they do all the professional recovery stuff, and then they would let us know all of this which usually cost £600, they said they do for free, which allowed us to believe that we may still get our photos back.

Chris: 4:44

And at this point, I did have a lot of hope for recovery.

Claire: 4:47

They collected it as they said we waited 13 long days while the photo men did their thing. And then we had an email to say they couldn't recover anything and they'd thrown the drive away.

Chris: 4:57

That hope I mentioned disappeared.

Claire: 4:59

The knot in my stomach when it happened, afterwards, and now, and when I remember, all the things I've lost, is horrible. I just couldn't stop my brain from trying to find more things that we'd lost, like you do with a human when they're gone, and you realise all the new ways it's gonna keep impacting you.

Chris: 5:15

There was a sliver of good news, we remembered that we hadn't moved everything onto that particular hard drive, because we had an older hard drive that we use before, we still had photos and documents up until about 2017. So we worked out with a bit of investigation, we'd lost a chunk of time from 2017, to about 2021, four years or so. So that was a small comfort. However, let's just get specific about some of the stuff that we did lose that we can remember. There's quite a long list. Let's go through a few specifically, of the major events, or many of the major events that we know we've lost because there's more that hasn't come to mind as yet. Firstly, and foremostly, animals. For the moment digital photography was invented, Claire at a zoo just became a bit of a nightmare, because you might have her standing with the penguins for ten minutes, and we'll come back with 300 photos. So across the course of four years, hundreds of photos that you'd have taken, all lost.

Claire: 6:08

I was on a run for almost doing all the zoos in the UK, the good ones. And there's not many bad zoos in the UK were pretty good over here with zoos. Especially like, like pandas, you can only see them in Edinburgh Zoo as the only place you can see them. So we took loads of footage at a very special moment alone, watching the pandas, which is incredible, because you have to queue and get a ticket to see the pandas. At the end of the day, we happen to just sneak over and get to see them, you know, all those kinds of photos - gone.

Chris: 6:32

We have memories in our mind, nothing on film. What else?

Claire: 6:36

Well, we had a lot of birthdays in that time, ours and other people's.

Chris: 6:39

Big birthdays!

Claire: 6:39

Some big birthdays. So me and you turned 40 in that period. So we had photos of days out with family and friends and a weekend with friends for me for that weekend. My auntie turned 100 and then 102. So we lost those. Your mom had a 70th weekend that we did down in Devon, so we had photos from that weekend. And there'd have been many others.

Chris: 7:00

Okay, moving on day trips locally, holidays in the UK went to Derbyshire, Oxford, we went to CS Lewis' grave, and for you as a big fan of literature and writing very much inspired by CS Lewis went to his grave spent some time just looking around the area. Time in Kingsweare in Devon, New Forest, they've all gone.

Claire: 7:17

And lots of other probably more local things we took photos of that I won't remember until the future, so they're gone. MotoGP weekends, and your motorbike, the last motorbike that you had would have fallen into that period, and when we sold it, we took loads of photos before we sold it and sort of say goodbye to it. It had a final kind of shoot of me and you sitting on it and stuff. So that's all gone.

Chris: 7:36

From one M to another. Murray Green, our chameleon.

Claire: 7:40

We had him for three years, all three years of his life fell into that period. So I have nothing outside of that, except for social media where he had his own Instagram account(@achameleonobserved), which annoyingly is still more popular than the site and why. And so I put lots of photos on there. So I've got them on there, like, you know, low res kind of naff ones but I think I must have had about 2,000 photos of him because his colours and you know, everything about his setup was so beautiful, I was just constantly taking images. So yeah, we've lost pretty much all of those.

Chris: 8:07

Other important holidays. We had some big holidays during this time as well. Some real big trips. Holland... well, that's not the biggest trip...!

Claire: 8:15

[laughs!] Holland?! Yeah, but that was me cycling a lot more than I ever do in the UK. You know Holland's built for cycling. That was a very good holiday.

Chris: 8:24

That's true. Yeah. Okay. Some of the major holidays. So Iceland, we did a trip, but this was part of my 40th birthday year, I chose something I wanted to do for my 40th. And so we went to Iceland for a week, just less than a week. Saw the Northern Lights, loads of crazy snow, driving a car with metal bubbles in the tires had some great experiences there with the weather. Yeah, all those photos have gone.

Claire: 8:43

Yeah, we also did America. We did three weeks touring California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada. We saw the Grand Canyon, went to Las Vegas, we saw Monument Valley, did Yosemite, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Sequoia, Joshua Tree, Death Valley, so many photos from that one holiday.

Chris: 8:59

And this was a second trip to California for me, because I loved it so much the first time when I went with university friends after graduating, so taking you back was brilliant, being able to do this, capture so many fun moments with the two of us.

Claire: 9:09

Yeah, there's a lot of good memories from that holiday. But even things like you know, Los Angeles and San Francisco, so many key things that we've seen in so many films and stuff, there was just, yeah... That was one of the biggest hits, I think, losing those. And then we also did another very meaningful holiday, we went to Lanzarote in 2018. And that was where we drew our line in the sand, where we decided that actually we're not going to do any more, kind of, we're not going to try any more things to have children. This is going to be us as a two and we're just going to move forward as we are and just accept that this might be our life now and this is how things are going to be. So we did all that, we took some photos of us on the beach, just the two of us together and where we were and what happened and yeah, all those photos unfortunately fell into that category.

Chris: 9:47

We did have one photo that we printed off in a very old fashioned way and put it in a photo frame and stuck it on the wall, of a room downstairs. So we have a small six by four inch photo of our flip-flops, and the line and a notepad and pen, and a tissue soaked in our tears.

Claire: 10:06

[chuckles]

Chris: 10:06

So we have that one image, but all the digital copies of it and the other pictures of us together doing that have gone.

Claire: 10:12

Yeah. And we also went to Egypt just before COVID. We were actually in Egypt, two, three days before England locked down. So we just managed to get out of Egypt by the skin of our teeth. But that was a lovely holiday. The Red Sea is just stunning for fish and sea life. And, you know, did a boat trip, we jumped off the back and did some snorkelling in the sea. And it was a really lovely trip, despite all the COVID stuff in the background. And yeah, that was also one of the holidays we lost.

Chris: 10:40

Other things; conferences, Christmas's, and New Year's.

Claire: 10:44

Yeah, we used to go lambing every year for a while, I loved having photos taken holding the lambs, helping the sheep give birth, all kinds of stuff like that. They were all in there. Work events, you know, there was Chris on TV with a giant cheese.

Chris: 10:56

That was, yeah, and we did, we did have pictures of that taking place that I've lost me, me and a giant inflatable cheese.

Claire: 11:04

I just had a picture of you with the giant inflatable cheese trying to get it up the stairs, things about six foot like diameter, so it's a massive cheese. And the reason it's a cheese is because in Brockworth, they do Cheese Rolling in this county. And Chris was involved in some kind of, kind of thing to do with that. So you had a giant inflatable cheese to move around for a while.

Chris: 11:22

Closer to home - garden project, we had a big redoing of the garden, during the early stages of the pandemic.

Claire: 11:30

Lots of photos of that being done.

Chris: 11:31

Oh my word! Hundreds of photos, maybe it's a blessing that most of those have gone.

Claire: 11:35

No! From the mud right through, actually, I do have quite a few of the gardens still, so that's not not been the biggest hit. And then I had things like my hysterectomy and surgery and just little things like, you know, you took a photo of me in bed when I was recovering. And I took a few photos when I got to my room of what it looked like and you know, little things like that just again, memories of I don't know, key things that have happened. It's just, I like having photos for things. I've always found that, you know, I'm a big photo taker. So whenever we go away, I like to take a photo of the room we're staying in. So Chris will always be like'do you want to take photos before we unpack? Before we put the suitcases on the bed?' I don't really remember rooms quite so easily. So I like to look back and go oh yeah, that's the room we stayed in. And that's what number room we stayed in. So if we go back, I can see. And then just it means a lot to me, I like doing that kind of thing. I found a lot of people take photos of places when they go out and about where you can see the photos anywhere. But very few people take photos of actually the room where you stayed. I'm quite often like, show me where you're staying. So all those sorts of things. They're not things I can get back again, or possibly ever know, what room I was in, or what it looked like. And I think that's what kind of made me sad. And I will say that when I you know the first few moments when I started to realise this might be gone forever, that feeling in my stomach was just such a sickening... It's that feeling like when you when you like, well it's grief, isn't it? Where you're just so out of control, something is happening to you. It's completely outside of your control. You can't do anything about it. And inside you just...urgh. Horrible feeling.

Chris: 12:59

And you can't see a way out of it.

Claire: 13:01

No, there isn't. That's it. That's what it is. I guess it's just so all encompassing, you can't get out.

Chris: 13:05

I think for us and how we deal with stuff like this, maybe you'll have asked similar questions about well, if only I'd done this, or if only I'd done that if only this hadn't happened. And I look back and think, you know, this was our backup that we've lost. So when on earth did the backup become the only sole source of these images? And how did that happen? And it's only as you mentioned a bit earlier only because what turned out to be the backup. And then just over the years, we started without thinking deleting the original copies of these images thinking 'Oh, it's okay, they're backed up, we'll delete them from our original source' maybe on the laptop where we downloaded them to. 'So we'll delete them for that because it's okay, they're backed up', without thinking that well, then your backup becomes your only copy. So to have lost the backup meant having lost the whole copy. So yeah, how did that happen? I just I still can't understand why we did that. I think it's a lost that I will trivialise and try and make

Claire: 13:55

And it's so annoying, because we are the go to tech people like you know, our parents and people who need help with tech. We're the ones who go in and help them and will quite often say to people 'have you backed this up? Have you got an external hard drive you're putting things on to as well?' Which we were and we just, like you said we just at some point started deleting them off the laptop. So they became not backed up. But just like I mean, at one point, we did have two hard drives running with the same amount of stuff on them. And I think there's just been this gap where over the years we had this, that's why we had the older photos, but there's this gap where we just hadn't backed up the backup onto the old hard drive beyond the new hard drive. No, it was just it was so sickening, because I think it's a really good example of you know, some losses are complicated because you feel like they were preventable, or you feel like there was a way of avoiding them some way. And that includes deaths as much as it does any of these kinds of things. And I think when there's that element to it, it's just a really hard thing to come to terms with and get your head around because it could have been different. Whereas some things are so out of your control, there's nothing you could have done about it. But with something like this, it feels like such a stupid mistake that had such a massive impact and, and I'd be tempted to say, I think if I was somebody new to this whole subject of loss and grief, you'd be like loss of photos, are you really going to put that alongside an episode of last week with our lovely Hui-wen was talking about the death of children on a hospital ward. But I think that's what we wanted the podcast to cover the fact that there's a lot of different losses, and we grieve them on very different levels, of course. But when I found out that I'd probably lost all these photos, the physical reaction in me, hit me in a very similar way to some of the news I've had, when other things have happened that have been more tragic, like, you know, somebody dying and stuff, and it doesn't last as long, there's not the same impact of grief. But there is an impact there. And I really want to just show that in the podcast and show that it's not all about one type of loss, and we'll categorise them all. And this loss is better than this loss, and this loss is harder than this loss. Because that's not always the case. And the loss is still there. And I can still feel a physical reaction when I think of something we did, and I realise I've got no memories of that now. Like, in photos, I have memories, but I don't have the full scope of photo memories. comedy out of if I'm telling people, so I'll share it... Yeah.

Chris: 16:11

...and tell people how shocking it was. But I'll I'll turn it into something funny, because there's probably something in me that's a bit embarrassed to be like, actually, this is quite painful. And that was a year ago that we lost these and I've, well we've both had multiple reminders, haven't we as things crop up? 'I must get that...' 'oh no we can't', 'we must go and look for those' 'oh no we can't'... 'We must show someone that' 'oh no we can't'. So loads of reminders come up that we don't have this that we've lost something. Have you felt any shame or embarrassment about telling people about this?

Claire: 16:42

Yeah, definitely shame and embarrassment, because I feel like the gut reaction for most people is like, 'why didn't you back them up?' Which is hilarious, because I would have probably thought the same thing. But it's not until you you've done it. It's like, 'well, that's great. But it's too late. Hindsight is 2020' and all that. It was a mistake. And that's what happened. So I feel like there's an element of like... I remember the guy on the chat with Seagate, we're first chatting to him trying to work it out, and then he told us that, you know, they couldn't get anything back again. I remember saying to him, I just feel so sick. Like this chat. He said, 'Oh, yeah, I've been there. You won't do it again, though.' And I thought, 'No, I won't do it again'. And I really want to tell other people like, don't don't do this, because it doesn't feel good. But what it has done, it's made me really appreciate what we have got. Because I remember thinking, what holidays were before that? And then thinking, 'Oh, we're okay, we've got the memories from this, this and this.' And we went to do Israel for 12 days. And that was a really special holiday took a lot of photos, very unlikely we could get the same ones of those again in any way. And we've still got those, and I remember just now when I think about it all I do think back to things like Israel and think I'm really grateful. I've got those photos. And it does sort of do something with your memories that you have in your head. It makes you kind of, I remember our friends, Ben and Grace, they went travelling and a while ago and they their camera was nicked, and they lost a whole chunk of their photos when they were travelling around South America. I think it was something like that. I remember them saying that for that period of time that they lost the photos for it was almost like they felt the memories were clearer in their head for that period. I just thought I think maybe it does do that it makes me think about America differently, and remember in different ways, because I can't just go back and look at the photos. So I guess that's a good thing.

Chris: 18:15

You're searching to fill in the missing space, fill in the blanks. And we did have some good news, in that while the way that we operate, we tend to put our choice photos on Instagram, let's say or, we were doing more so back then. And so on a big trip like California, this huge experience we built up to every day, we'd put a selection of our choice choicest images onto Instagram as a bit of a diary as a reminder of what we've done that day. And you might not know this, but if you ever have something similar and lose your photos, you can request from Instagram, a file to be sent to you, which will be the sort of the store of your images or your images on Instagram. So we received all the images that would post on Instagram, but in small sort of square, so like pretty much a copy of what you see through the app, so we received a folder full of images. So we were able to take lots of those from California, from Iceland, from some of the other experiences that we've had. And then we turned that into a photo book. So we got them put into a photo book that was produced, and we have that now on a bookshelf with the title 'All is not lost'. So it's nice to save some of those even though it's, it's still, you know, it's lovely to have them and to have them to flick through in paper. But it's still like, 'it's just small copies', and these are worth big high-res desktop sort of images.

Claire: 19:34

I think as techy people, we appreciate the difference, for a lot of people, I think, there'd be like, 'Oh, great. I've got I've got an image'. We're like, 'oh, no, we want the original one'. But yeah, and things like you know, our parents have been very sweet in saying to us, well if there's anything you're missing, let us know because you might have sent it to us on like WhatsApp, or one of those things, but again it's a low-res version, it's quite hard to to pinpoint what out of that period you'd want them to send you, unless you think of something very specific, in which case you can say 'Have you got a picture of that particular birthday gathering?' or whatever, it's a bit difficult to try and collate lots of individual things that you might have sent people, but I do find that over time, I'm able to look at it differently. And I now feel like it's a sort of, it's a sad, and it's a frustrating thing. But I don't feel the impact of it that I felt in those first hours after it happened, when I just sort of kept sitting down, and I remember it now just such a sick feeling of just like, oh, that did not just happen. I think America stands out the most, because the breadth of what we did was so wide. I think when I think about that, just like, oh, it makes me feel a bit ill because there was so many different little things, but it was at Universal Studios, right through to the Grand Canyon and standing you know, Bryce Canyon, we took so many amazing photos there.

Chris: 20:47

Actually, we keep saying photos, but videos as well. Oh, yeah, true. We took as many video clips in these places through our phones, because of this modern technology. So we had loads of video clips that we lost, as well as the photos.

Claire: 20:57

Yeah, and hyperlapse driving through Hollywood and stuff.

Chris: 21:00

Exactly! It's quite often the video's I want to see some bits that were like 'Oh do you remember that guy that was performing?' or'This thing that we saw or this drive, this route that we did?' And we want to go back and see the videos, again, maybe more so than the images at times, and we lost those, those videos. So considering it is a very Western thing, in a sense, it's a luxury that we have this digital technology and the ability to take photos. It's a very modern thing, because go back 20, 30, 40 years, you wouldn't do this, you would have your film. And then you have your pictures printed. So because it's modern, because it's Western, because it's a luxury, why does it hurt to have lost, why did it hurt back then, you said, time has healed a little bit, why did it hurt then? And why does it still hurt, a bit now?

Claire: 21:41

I think it feels like it's a waste. It's just like, you know, one mistake and suddenly so much is lost, that just feels like a waste. To me, that's the frustrating thing. It's not like somebody nicked them, and then they're using them for themselves and enjoying them, where it's like, 'well, that's annoying, and that's unfair, but it's something that happened and they're out there just I can't get ahold of them'. It's like they're just gone, like they're just literally, they're sat on a drive that nobody can get to or they're on a drive that got destroyed, and that's that, it's like that just doesn't feel right. It's, it's like any loss, just on a very different scale, something is gone, and it feels like a waste and you don't want it to be gone, you want it to be here.

Chris: 22:17

For us two being childless. You know, we do invest more time more resource, obviously, because it's what we do have, in creating experiences with the two of us. So when we go to places like Iceland and California, as we've talked about, you know, we will use that opportunity not just to go and sit in a room and read a book, but to go and create memories to go and create experiences. And nothing can spoil the memories that we have, you know, that we're carrying with it in our memory. But to have lost a lot of the reminders, there will be things that places that we've seen, people that we've met food that we've eaten, that we did take pictures of that we will have forgotten, because there's too much to remember, you remember the headlines, but it's too much of the detail to remember from such big adventures wonderful experiences. So for the two of us, I think it adds just a slight, a different a different level of of that, man, they were such sort of unique experiences that we created for the two of us.

Claire: 23:17

And if we'd had children, we'd have obviously lost four years of children's photos. And I feel like in some way, shape or form people would identify with that more and be more sympathetic with that. So I feel like there is this need to excuse away what we've lost as a joke or not a big deal. And, and it's almost weird and embarrassing to be chatting on a podcast about losing photos, when we've covered so many huge human losses. But that's why I want to do it because I want people to see the impact of some of these things. And you might come across a colleague at work who's just like, 'Oh, I just lost all my photos at the weekend, cos | dropped the hard drive'. And for some people, you might just think, 'well, that's not a big deal. I lost my mum last year'. But I I want people to be aware that you know, in the moment and for different people, different losses have different impacts. And I think it's really important to acknowledge no matter how weird or embarrassing it might feel to say, actually, we lost this and it was really hard.

Chris: 24:17

Well, you must you must know somebody who this has happened to something like this. We, just in our circle of friends, and family, we've got friends, Ben and Grace.

Claire: 24:26

Yeah. And my mum, I know that she had an old fashioned film camera pinched, I think when we got burgled or maybe from a car, but there were photos on there of my cousin when she was a baby, and they got lost. The sad thing was I remember sort of saying they would have just thrown the film away because they wanted the camera and actually the only thing she really messed with what was on the film, so that felt quite destroying. I felt like they should have wound it on, taken it out, left out and taken the camera.

Chris: 24:51

That would have been thoughtful, wouldn't it?! Of the burglar. How kind. So yeah, you know, you must know people that can say similar and well will have felt similar. So maybe you need to go and say to them, 'You know what, I didn't give you enough credit at the time, for the pain that you'd have felt when you lost that camera', or that film or photos, whatever it may have been.

Claire: 25:10

Because we talk a lot about people not really knowing what to say, or being dismissive of people's losses. And I would imagine that all of us have been dismissive about smaller losses. You know, we're very big on the big losses, and oh, yeah, I know, I know what to say now, someone loses a parent, loses a family member, loses a child, you know, I'm geared up for that. But then someone comes to you with a loss that's a bit smaller or seemingly more insignificant in your own eyes, and it's very easy to make a glib comment because you think, well, it's not quite like the loss I faced. And actually, I want to be like, 'No, let's remember that everybody has an experience with loss that hurts' and we need to be sympathetic of that across the board.

Chris: 25:47

In your hurt, did you ever ask why?

Claire: 25:51

Did I ever ask why?

Chris: 25:52

Why?!!

Claire: 25:54

I don't think I did, partly because I knew why. I knew the answer to the question why - I dropped it, that's why it happened. I didn't really question 'Why did I drop it?' I dropped it because the laptop thing wasn't... you know, that for me makes sense. So it wasn't really the why question. There was more just the sadness at the loss of it. I just move straight on to the next stage of just being sad that it had happened. Did you question, Why did I drop it?

Chris: 26:19

I didn't question why you dropped it, because that wouldn't have, I fully acknowledge, I'm aware that accidents happen. So there's absolutely no blame, I think I would have, I did feel like, oh, man, this is one of those things if something could go wrong. It does, so it's like 'why couldn't we have been the three out of five individuals that get the images back?' You know, similar to, around the time it happened to us, I was at work talking to a colleague who'd had exactly the same thing and external hard drive that had contained some photos and quite a lot of audio recordings. She works in radio broadcasting, so she had a lot of personal audio recordings that were important to her. And she dropped a harddrive plugged it in it wouldn't recognise it, sent it away to a local IT expert - who retrieved everything. And it's like, 'Oh, why couldn't that have been our story?' So I think that bit hurt me in the sense of 'why did it have to be as that have the story of 'they're gone','they're gone', and that's it?' Sorry about that, I feel a bit blue now.

Claire: 27:19

We've depressed ourselves.

Chris: 27:21

Let's go take some photos. So yeah, we backup backup now. We're having to pay now for Cloud Storage, every

Claire: 27:27

Yeah, we've gone down that route, which is annoying, year. because so many people were like, 'Oh, do you not have cloud storage?' It feels like that's the kind of thing people say to grievers where it's like the wrong question the wrong, feels like saying, 'at least you had this'. It's the equivalent. Don't say to somebody 'have you not got cloud storage?' because you know what Cloud Storage is really expensive. And it peeves me off that I have to pay that much now, just to have peace of mind about our photos.

Chris: 27:49

Every year, yeah. When you buy a device, like an external hard drive, you expect to use it until it's full. And because of the way technology works, now, you can get, you know, two terabytes of memory, which for a couple, it takes a long time to fill two terabytes with photos, video and documents. So you're going to be using that two terabytes for 5, 6, 7 years, if it if it lasts its full life. And in that time, technology will change a lot. USB settings will change a lot. So you know, you have to make sure if you do have that, that you take very good care of that device, because there will be whirring, whizzy parts inside that do not want to be dropped and damaged. Or play it safe and spend an annual fee like we're having to do now on Cloud Storage.

Claire: 28:30

Yeah.

Chris: 28:32

Clown Storage, more like! That would look great wouldn't it?! Imagine what clown storage looks like!

Claire: 28:38

People don't like clowns, they get a very bad rep, a lot of people are scared of clowns. Not sure why.

Chris: 28:42

We've reached that time. I don't know whether to say'your' or 'our'. What's your or our Herman? What's our Herman?

Claire: 28:50

Well, I think, ultimately, it's that you have to let go.

Chris: 28:55

Can I sing?

Claire: 28:56

No, it doesn't mean it won't still hurt, but if you don't let go of the pain and the guilt and the regret and the frustration and annoyance of the situation, I think it has the possibility to just eat you alive and dominate you. And you know, nothing is worth that in life. It is hard, but you have to keep letting go, and it might be over and over again. And you have to keep doing it. But every time I think of it, and I feel like I could just get really bitter and twisted about the situation, I have to make the choice to let that go. Because I can't keep going on forever talking about this one holiday, these two holidays, birthday, whatever it was, and 'oh I've got no photos of that'. That's not healthy. No one wants to hear it anyway, I just think it's letting go, you have to keep making that decision to let go of the bad stuff and remember the good.

Chris: 29:42

So there you have it, let us be a cautionary tale to you, if you don't have anything backed up properly. This is a permanent loss, but it's also a preventable one.

Claire: 29:52

And if you're new to us, thank you for listening. You can hear more about some of our other personal losses in Episode

Chris: 29:57

Loss of fertility Loss of pets.

Claire: 30:01

And we also did some recent reflections on the loss of our queen in Episodes 49 and 50.

Chris: 30:06

We've by no means covered all our losses, nobody avoids loss for very long, we're sure there'll be more to come.

Claire: 30:11

If you get value from this podcast and you want to support my work in producing it, writing blogs, putting it together as a resource for those going through loss. There are lots of ways you can do that. Whether financial...

Chris: 30:21

www.buymeacoffee.com/thesilentwhy

Claire: 30:23

Or through reviews of the show, or by sharing the podcast with a friend that might need some hope amid some of their losses, whatever you want to do, pop along to the website, www.thesilentwhy.com/support. And we've got all the ways you can do that there.

Chris: 30:34

Also online, you'll see a list of losses recovered so far, as well as photos of our guests- that we haven't lost!

Claire: 30:40

And if you're on social media, why not give us a follow, you'll get to see pictures of our guests, quotes, photos, podcasting, life and Instagram stories of all we're up to. You can find us by searching 'The Silent Why' on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube where we're slowly uploading all our episodes onto our new channel.

Chris: 30:55

We want to say thank you so much for your support. Any of you on social media will know it's not an easy environment to grow a following. So any support likes comments, followers, retweets, whatever it may be, they're hugely appreciated.

Claire: 31:06

And we're gonna finish this episode with a quote from Billy Graham."When wealth is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something is lost. When character is lost, all is lost."

Chris: 31:24

When photos are lost,[sings] - Let it gooo!

Claire: 31:27

You need to let that go.