Wedding Photographer Finds True Meaning in Her Job After Losing Both Parents to Cancer

Kelsey Combe’s 2017 was a year peppered with emotional highs and lows. The 30-year-old wedding photographer found herself shuttling between New York, where she lived and worked, and her family’s cottage in Michigan as first her mother and then her father succumbed to rare forms of cancer just three months apart.

Her mother, Sharon Fuller, was first diagnosed and treated for lung cancer in 2014, but was declared cancer-free that same year; the following year, however, the family was informed that the cancer had in fact spread to her spinal cord and that she was terminal. She was thankfully accepted into a clinical trial that extended her life another year and a half, but during that time, Combe’s father Doug Fuller was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

When Sharon’s condition worsened following a hip surgery, Combe and her siblings—Elliott Fuller and Crissie Vitale—took their parents to Michigan, Sharon’s favorite place, to enjoy their remaining time together as a family.

Her mother eventually passed away on June 14, and her father followed three months later, on Sept. 25.

During that difficult time leading up to their deaths, Combe tells The Knot, one thing that helped the family to cope with the painful process was going through old photographs together, including one particularly impactful picture.

“It’s actually a photo from my sister’s wedding, the summer before my mother died,” she tells us. “The photographer captured her sitting with my dog, Xander, in her lap. She’s holding him and comforting him amidst all the wedding crazy. She had recently lost her hair, and is wearing a scarf. She looks absolutely beautiful, and she had a really special relationship with my dog, so I’m so so thankful for that photo. I didn’t even see it happening that day.”

“I think that exemplifies the power of wedding photography,” she continues. “A wedding photographer can capture moments that you might miss on the day of your wedding. And those images can end up being the most important ones.”

Combe also took it upon herself to use her photography skills to document her parents’ final days, following the gentle advice of a friend who had similarly lost both her parents to cancer within a year.

“At first I thought there was no way I could or would do that, but I brought my camera to the last few days of my mother’s life and worked to document it,” she says. “When you are in the presence of death, it’s a blur. It’s quite literally putting one foot in front of the other. There’s not guidelines—no rule book. No one has prepared you or told you what to do. To that extent, having my camera helped me process what was happening.”

She explains that her brother recently saw a photo she took of him lying next to their mother while her sister comforted him. “He said it made him cry, but he was so happy we have that photo,” Combe says.