A week before, I had photographed the funeral of Sonia, a young woman who lived with profound physical disabilities. Her parents, Rachel and Peter, had asked me to document the day so they could later create a keepsake of her life and the love that surrounded it.

Not long after delivering the photographs, I received an unexpected email from Rachel. She wondered if there were any pictures of her father. Among the more than 300 images I’d shared, he did not appear once. Rachel explained that he had arrived late, sat quietly at the back, and left before the wake.

Curious, I went back through the images I hadn’t originally selected—those unflattering or redundant in composition—but her father was missing from those too. I wrote to Rachel with my apologies, sorry that I couldn’t find even a single frame that included him.

Two months later, I finished assembling Sonia’s keepsake book—a collection of my photographs, Rachel and Peter’s eulogies, and six moving tributes from Sonia’s carers. I invited Rachel and Peter to my studio to review the final draft before printing.

As we went through the book together, Rachel spoke about what the absence of her father’s photo had come to mean. Throughout her life, she said, she had tried to deny his emotional absence, but seeing him missing even from her daughter’s funeral photographs made the truth impossible to overlook. What I had seen as an omission became, for her, a moment of revelation. That realisation led her to seek help from a psychologist—a step she described as profoundly healing.

The names of persons have been changed to protect their privacy