Compassion

Scrolling through the list of Pictures of the Year Award winners, the title "Remember Me" caught my eye. I clicked on it, and the tears started almost as soon as the pictures and the story came out. Carolynne St. Pierre, a wife and mother of three children, was diagnosed with liver cancer and given days or months to live. Preston Gannaway and Kari Collins of the Concord Monitor chronicled her last few months of life. The situation itself would be enough to make me feel for this family, but the pictures, just the way they captured their everyday life and how they were dealing with the grief; it was indescribable. The audio added to the images, impacting the viewer in even bigger ways because it made it all the more real. The picture of Rich picking out his wife's casket.. That was one of the best images in my opinion. It just brought everything home in a way that none of the others did. This family was preparing for their wife and mother to die. Then Melissa, the daughter, said that it's become "normal" to see her mother in the hospital and that she's gotten used to it. I can't imagine having to become used to seeing my mother constantly sick and tired, laying in a hospital bed with no energy to move. A time goes on, you can see Carolynne get progressively thinner, look more tired, and just fall into the "sickly" category. This combination of pictures and narration really brought this story together and did an unbelievable job of bringing the reader into this family's story.