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Some parents find it too painful to look at old photos of their child who died. I felt the opposite. Going down memory lane and seeing photos of Rob as a kid and as an adult kept me connected to him, and that’s what I needed the most in the first few months after his death.

If that’s not what you need the most, I get it, but I’d still suggest looking at a photo or two every now and then. Viewing old photos is like time traveling. There’s your child, growing up right before your eyes, until it stops before it’s supposed to stop. It’s heartbreaking, I know, and the anguish can be too much to bear, but if you can somehow stick with it, a bittersweet joy eventually arises from these photographic ashes.

At least that was the way it worked for me. I’d often start my tour at the top of the stairs with my all-time favorite photo—a framed poster-sized picture of me and the kids in our backyard when we lived in Long Island. It was taken for a story about having testicular cancer that I wrote for GQ more than 40 years ago. Zach’s wearing an Allan Houston Knicks jersey and Rob’s wearing a rare Michael Jordan Bulls jersey (45 was his number when he returned to Chicago after playing baseball). We’re all barefoot, which I always thought was such a sweet touch. It’s the most beautiful photo of the three of us ever taken, and looking at it made me sadder than any other photo in the house.

Hanging on another wall upstairs is a picture we called “The Menendez Brothers.” It was also taken in our backyard, right around the time the real Menendez brothers were convicted of murdering their parents. Both kids (maybe they were three and four) wear black sweatshirts and sport identical “deer in the headlights” looks.

Downstairs on the first floor is the photo that accompanied the first Esquire story I wrote about Robbie. That’s the one I look at—and talk to—most often, as it sits right across from our dining room table, where I’m routinely parked at my laptop. It’s the only portrait that captures who Rob was on the inside, and that’s why I took it out of storage after he died.

I used to have it hanging on a wall in my old apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. But then a feng shui expert came to my place and noted that none of the photos of my kids showed them smiling, something that had never occurred to me. I just thought the pictures were beautiful and kind of sophisticated.

Taking her advice to heart, I replaced them with “happier” snapshots, and those are the photos that came to sit on my bookcase in Los Angeles. On the top shelf is one of Rob and Zach, taken on Zach’s eighteenth birthday. His presents included a skydiving jump and his first tattoo, and I remember all of us having such a great time that day.

Just below that photo is another all-time favorite, a shot of the two of them as teenagers. I must’ve somehow made them laugh, because their smiles are so big and genuine that you can feel how much they love each other. Zach prized this pic so much that he got a tattoo of it on his back several years before Rob died. We all used to joke about how the tattoo artist didn’t do such a hot job in the likeness department, making both kids look—how should I put this?—mentally challenged. But Zach finally had another artist touch it up and now it looks exactly like the original photo.

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On the next shelf is a shot of the kids taken for my birthday. Rob is holding a sign that says, “Happy Birthday,” and Zach’s sign says, “Daddy We Love You.” They must’ve been four or five and both are wearing party hats.On the bottom shelf is another all-time fave, and I know I keep repeating that phrase but isn’t that what we do? It’s not like I’m going to hang photos of Rob having a meltdown at Disney World! This beauty shows my father-in-law, Marty, holding Rob’s little hands while he’s standing in Marty’s lap. This is right around Rob’s first birthday, and he’s smiling at the camera while Marty is smiling hard at his grandson. It captures a moment of pure joy that, years later, has turned to irrevocable sadness because both of these two people I loved so dearly are no longer with us.

Yet there’s something sweet about that sadness: a reminder of the depth of the connection that I felt—and continue to feel—with Rob.

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