The Forum Where People Share Heartbreaking Final Photos of Their Loved Ones

The /r/lastimages subreddit is, as the name suggests, a place for people to share the last images taken of people before their death.

Between the purported final photos of public figures like Audrey Hepburn and Heath Ledger are user-submitted pictures of friends and family who have passed. There are beautiful, heartbreaking images of everyone from children who died at birth to great-grandparents who broke 100.

Last week, Giovanni Alain submitted a photo of his great-grandmother, taken two days before her death. "I had come across /r/lastimages a while back, and I remember not knowing how to feel… it was really shocking at first," he told me by email. "I think in mainstream media we’re so used to seeing pictures and they often times aren’t anything of substance. Ads, promotions, political jargon, whatever. But then suddenly seeing photos with so much depth and meaning while being so simplistic and raw was such a unique experience. And it was the same feeling seeing the photo of my great grandma, so it felt only right to post it there on r/lastimages with the rest."

Below, six more users of the subreddit discuss the photos they submitted and the loved ones pictured in them. These accounts have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The photo was taken October 28 2016, before her kindergarten halloween party. She died November 1.

Her stepfather killed her while her mom was at work. She was five years old. I'll link a news story, but I will caution that if you read the story, you won't forget it. It's gruesome.

This girl. She was so sassy and spunky! She loved Hello Kitty, butterflies, and ladybugs. Luna's favorite color was orange! For years, a love of orange. She had only recently started to branch out to pink and purple. She loved going for pancakes at Flap Jack Shack, our local pancake place. Watching Frozen, baking cookies, ice cream, going bowling, swimming, art projects, school. She loved pretty things, like dressing up. Even as a baby she would put those plastic stacking rings on her wrists like bracelets. Frilly tulle skirts, flower crowns with long ribbons down her back,

I can't look at her picture long yet. Even an unexpected Hello Kitty sighting will put a lump in my throat. It makes me think of how she will never change. Never get any older. She doesn't get the chance to grow up. Our family has been turned inside out. It's not just that she died, people die all the time. She was murdered. There was no car accident, no sickness, no fluke act of God that caused her death. It was caused by another human being. A man who had promised to take care of her, and love her. A man who had joined our family just a few months earlier when he married her mother. There is no time of the year where there isn't a "Luna anniversary" coming up. Her birthday is January, the trial was in July, the wedding was August, she died in November. There is always someone missing from our family celebrations now. A dark spot you can feel, but try to ignore. Grief is not linear, it never goes away completely.

-Laura Chin, great aunt of Luna Younger

She had a poem she would tell my brother and I since we were kids. I could never remember the rest of it, but the beginning is: "Choices choices what do they mean. They can determine your future or destroy your dreams." Pretty lame, but it’s stuck with us all these years. She also used to do this crouching jumping-up-and-down dance, like that Russian dance where they fold the arms. She wanted me to do that for a middle school talent show. Said "hell no" to that.

She left behind (at the time) a two-year-old granddaughter. I have so many pictures of them together, so I’d thought it’d be pretty easy to keep her memory alive for my daughter, but two-year-olds don’t have memories for shit. So, now she’s calling Gramma Tala (yes, the character from Moana) her grandmother. Better than nothing, I guess.

Also, I can’t stand to look at older female black characters with sad storylines. I like watching the GLOW show on Netflix. There was an episode in the second season with Welfare Queen. That episode put me in a place emotionally I just didn’t want to be in. Haven’t seen the show since.

-Jeremy Mosley, son of Belinda Mosley

That photo was taken in early July of 2010. And it was less than a month before he passed. He died of heart failure, associated with his COPD and lifelong smoking habit. His brother passed within the last year because of the same thing. My dad was 49 when he died. My favorite memories with him were the really small times, like him teaching me how to play pool, his laugh, the way he teased everyone. I have tons of photos from Disney World when I was around four or five, and all I can remember about that trip is how my dad (embarrassingly) flirted with the Little Mermaid.

I feel a lot of emotions when I look at that photo. It's sad, because at that time our relationship wasn't good. My aunt had sent a desperate plea to my mom for me to see him because he was fading fast. I kind of think he was waiting to see me one last time before he passed. But I'm also glad I went, because I was able to see that I meant a lot to him, especially when he introduced me to every single nurse at the nursing home and they would exclaim, "YOU'RE Rachel!" That photo doesn't define my dad as who I saw him to be, though. I will probably never forget his smoker's cough, but he wasn't that sick until the last couple of years. I've since graduated from high school, graduated from college, and it's very bittersweet that my dad was not able to be there for those things. But I do believe he was there in spirit. Losing my dad at 17 will always be a big part of me, but I don't let it define me.

-Rachel Christine Ham, daughter of Richard Charles Ham

The photo was taken the night of August 4, 2009. She passed away around 5 AM on August 5. This Sunday coming up will mark nine years.

Julie was 17 when she took her own life after a short battle with depression. She'd been drinking that night, so that definitely contributed to her death.

When I look at that photo, I'm glad she's smiling with her eyes closed. It hides the pain, and she looks so genuinely happy. It perfectly captured the Julie everyone knew and loved. There's no way of knowing what was going to happen next just by looking at it. There couldn't be a better "LastImage" of Jules.

Life has done a complete 180 since the day this picture was taken. It's coming up to nine years. At first, I was very self destructive and full of guilt. Now, I'm trying to take my pain and help others dealing with similar situations. I suppose that's why I posted in the first place.

-Emily Irwin, best friend of Julie Hollingshead

The photo was taken approximately six hours before we found him in his crib after passing from Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood. He was one year and three days old. He passed on the night of his birthday party.

My favorite memory of him was when we were driving around two days before he passed away. “All I Want To Do” by Sugarland was playing on the radio and he was dancing while I was singing, and he kept looking up at me and giggling. I feel sad when I look at this picture because I miss him so much that it physically hurts, but at the same time it makes me happy because he was such a beautiful soul. My life had changed dramatically since he passed. I appreciate my living children and my life more than I did before. I make sure my sons hear “I love you” and “I’m proud of you” every day, because I never want them to have to question how much of a gift they are to this world.

I shared this picture with Reddit because I think it is important to keep his memory alive, to tell his story, and to make sure people know that this little boy used to be in our world.

-Alissa Zeigler, mother of Jackson

He passed in 2009. His friends and family called him Big Daddy. He was a firefighter/EMT. My favorite memory of him was when I was about ten years old. We were about to head home from dinner when he got a call on his radio that an old factory in town was on fire. So he nonchalantly said, “We have to go help these yahoos.”

We pull up to the old factory and he parked pretty close. He told me to stay in the truck then he disappeared for a little bit. After a while, some of the guys pointing up toward the roof. I know I was young and already thought the world of big daddy but I will never forget seeing my dad (in his fire-retardant pants held up with suspenders and no shirt) on the roof wielding an axe as he was hacking a hole. As I was watching my dad go through the roof with an axe I noticed all the other firefighters pointing and talking. I knew it wasn’t just me being a ten-year-old boy who looked up to his dad and thought, “This was amazing!” They also thought my dad was amazing. He passed away when I was 18. While at his funeral I was not able to stand and make the speech I prepared the night before. (I wrote down this story to say at his eulogy.) While I was sitting in the pews at the church a younger-looking guy stood up in his firefighter blues. He went on and told this story of Bill. This man told [the same story that I'd written] down, not as Bill's son, but as a rookie firefighter watching in awe as he witnessed him on the roof of that old factory.

I love that man with everything I am. I try every day to live with what he taught me. He missed my first beer, when I married the love of my life, and the birth of my beautiful daughter. I miss him terribly. I hope he looks down and is proud of the man I’ve become.

-Jacob Myers, son of William Brown

This was taken two days before she passed, by my grandmother. My grandmother went to see her on Friday and she passed early Sunday morning. She died of old age. Her body just began to fail. I guess that’s what happens when you’re pushing 100!

When my father and mother got married, they moved here to Phoenix, where I would eventually grow up. But all of the rest of my family still lived in San Fransisco so that meant that I didn’t see them very often, especially the more distant ones, like my two great-grandmothers. When I did see them, however, it was magical. They were these people that I didn’t know very well, yet they were so happy to see me and they loved me so much, for reasons I was unaware of. It was an overwhelming feeling I remember not being able to understand as a child but now looking back on it, that feeling was immense thankfulness.

I’ll never forget my first Christmas at her house across the Bay Bridge, in Oakland. She found out all of my hobbies and interests from my parents and got me a little something from all of my favorite shows and movies. I was so taken aback by the love I was receiving from someone who was almost a total stranger to me. The feeling of playing with those Star Wars action figures on the heated hardwood floor of the den downstairs is something I hope to carry with me forever.

[When I saw the photo,] to be honest, I felt so broken. It had been a long time since I had seen her, since I wasn’t able to go the last time my parents visited her. So suddenly seeing this woman I’d know my whole life sitting on what would eventually become her death bed shook me so deep. The composition, the low quality of my grandmother’s outdated flip phone, the barren walls, and the look of helplessness in her posture elicited such a gut wrenching reaction the first time I saw the photo. It made me feel like I had failed her somehow and that here was this woman who loved so many people but yet it looked like she died alone.

However, what I couldn’t see was all the people she loved so deeply standing behind the camera smiling, crying, celebrating and thinking about what wonderful memories they have because of the life she lived. Now, for me, this photo has become a bit of a totem of the raw beauty of death and life and life after death.

-Giovanni Alain, great grandson of Norma Joan Cabral

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