A widowed father is remembering his late wife the best way he can — by recreating his wedding photos, this time with his 3-year old daughter Olivia.
Credit: rockpink4ali.com / Ben Nunery (Melanie Pace, Loft3 Photography)
Ben Nunery, 34, of Ohio lost his wife in 2011 to a rare form of lung cancer. Their daughter was just a year old.
They had bought their marital home one day before their wedding in 2009 and decided to have their wedding photos taken in it.
Credit: rockpink4ali.com / Ben Nunery (Melanie Pace, Loft3 Photography)
This year he decided to sell their home, but not before recreating these touching photos. They show the widowed husband and his daughter in the same poses shot the day after Ben and Ali were wed.
Credit: rockpink4ali.com / Ben Nunery (Melanie Pace, Loft3 Photography)
Ben said he wanted the images to be “beautiful reminders of the past” and not painful reminders of their loss.
Ben wrote about the experience. Here’s an excerpt:
“I did it for me. I did it for us. I did it so I would have something to show for the love and beauty that occupied that house for a short time in our lives. I wanted to be able to show Olivia the place where her mother and I started our lives together and dreamed of raising children. I thought it would be much harder to say goodbye in this way, but as I sat in the driveway, ready to drive away for the last time, I realized that it’s just a house. The memories of Ali don’t live in that house. They live with us, in our hearts. We take them with us wherever we go and they will live with us in our new house too. A house is just a house. Yes, I will miss it but I still have the memories of Ali and I still have Olivia, the most precious evidence of the love Ali and I shared and still share. Since Melanie posted the photos on her blog, many people have asked me how I felt while doing that photo session. What I want them to know is that this isn’t a story about grief and loss and hurt. Yes, I’ve gone through those emotions and still do but that’s not what I want people to see in these photos. This is a story about love. The pain is nothing compared to the love that I feel for Ali and Olivia and that’s the story I want these pictures to tell to Olivia in the years to come and anyone else that sees them. The pain will subside little by little but the love never will, no matter where we live. Our lives will continue down a curvy and uncertain path but Olivia and I will be able to look at these photos and know that for a short time there was a place where I was the luckiest man in the world, even if just for a little while.” Read more.
View more photos from Loft3 Photography.
