Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
It's a pleasure to share one's memories. Everything remembered is dear, endearing, touching, precious. At least the past is safe-though we didn't know it at the time. We know it now. Because it's in the past; because we have survived.