Would the world be different without photographs, or would we simply replace those images with other charged idols, like clothes, coins, or glasses? What difference would that make to our preserving of the imagined, remembered ghost of a person? These relics will recede from the table, I realise even as I draw comfort from the shrine, just as the grinning lady in my other family is no longer at our table, even in conversation. I wonder if she is in the thoughts of the man I watched, brave, as they told her story; a man I already feel receding himself.