Boston Globe,MA
Jan 13 2008

Deleting Him
When an ex leaves your life, should he disappear from your photo
album, too?

By Marianne Jacobbi
January 13, 2008

Our family holiday cards were picture-perfect. So were the family
albums and the framed photos on display throughout the house. I spent
weeks and weeks arranging those pictures of babies cooing, toddlers
learning to walk, daughters in pretty party dresses blowing out
birthday candles, and a son in his first tux decked out for the prom.
There was page after page of happy times, of smiling kids and
grandparents, of cousins and friends together. It was our history,
and we took those albums out and would sit together on the sofa and
laugh at everybody’s braces and baby fat and big hair.

(Illustration by Kim Rosen)
more stories like thisNow the man in the middle of many of the
photos, my ex-husband, is out of the picture. I wasn’t sure what to
do with all the images from our past life after we split up. Most
people take the pictures down off the wall and put the albums away.
Who wants to look at the family that was? After our divorce, I
gathered up the photos of our married life and packed them away in
boxes in the attic, lots of boxes filled with more than 25 years’
worth of memories captured on film. What to do with them all? What
stays? What goes? I was the keeper of the archives, and I’d deal with
these questions later.

Last month, I was ready to think about the photos. I went to see
Hagop Iknaian. He owns Hagop’s Art Studio in Cambridge and he framed
most of our family photographs. In business for 40 years, he has met
many people in my shoes. Hagop, 63, is a man of few words, and he
speaks with a thick Armenian accent. "You have only three choices,"
he told me. "Destroy. Cut. Or replace. That’s it."

I have a friend who took the first tack. She’d been through an
acrimonious divorce that had cost her a great deal emotionally and
financially. On the night she discovered that her ex had remarried,
she sat alone in front of the fireplace and over a bottle of red wine
threw her wedding pictures into the fire one by one. That may have
been therapeutic for her, but picture burning, which I tried once
after a breakup in college, has never been healing for me.

Elsa, a distant relative, simply cut people out of the picture. When
her daughter divorced 30 years ago from a philandering husband, Elsa
took her scissors and hole punch and removed the head of her former
son-in-law from all of the photo albums. (She kept his body intact so
as not to ruin the photos completely.) That solution wouldn’t work
for me either, since I’d hate to ruin the albums. Of course nowadays,
with digital pictures and Photoshop, it would be easy as pie to cut
out a cheater, and Elsa would have been all set. There’s no gaping
hole and you’re back to picture-perfect in minutes. But is it a good
idea to mess with history by erasing it? Probably not, although I
have fantasized about Photoshopping my ex out of our wedding pictures
and replacing him with Patrick Dempsey.

The truth is you can’t just reframe your life in one fell swoop, no
matter how hard you try. You can’t hole punch someone from your
memories or edit the past by throwing the pictures away. You have to
let go of the old images, create new ones, and then put your life
back together again, big picture and all. You have to come to terms
with the past – and that takes time.

My friend Marsha has done it. Six years ago, she went through a
painful divorce. For the first time since then, she’s able to look at
a photograph from an early chapter of her marriage and appreciate it.
"My ex and I are grinning with the kids in front of a huge
waterfall," she says. "I’m able to remember the magic of that day and
smile."

Our family albums from the past are still in one piece – untouched –
and they’re my children’s history now. I’ll pass the albums on to
them one day. As for the pictures on the wall, they’ve been replaced
with new photos from the present and past. Baby one, baby two, baby
three. Three little kids and a dog. Three grown kids and mom. The
family we are today. Hagop did an excellent job.