Just one more picture among the thousands a mother takes, the kind you never look at twice, the kind that piles up in the cloud and gets forgotten.

I did not know, standing in that driveway with the dust of their leaving still settling around my ankles, that I had just photographed four people I would never see alive again.

If there is a particular cruelty in the ordinary photograph, it is this — that it is taken by someone who believes there will be a thousand more.

You do not compose the last picture of your family carefully.

You do not choose the light or ask them to hold still for the right reasons.