A Massachusetts widow thought all hope was lost after she accidentally deleted photos of some of her favorite memories. For 74-year-old Joanne Chambers, it was more than memories. The photos were the final days she had with her husband.
“I don’t wanna cry. I haven’t cried in a long time,” Chambers said as she tearfully recalled making a mistake on her phone. “I deleted some very important pictures from my phone. They were pictures of my husband whose been deceased now for ten months.”
Chambers and her husband Charles were married for 37 years and have plenty of photos together, but the ones she lost were different.
“Because those were real, those were the last days,” she said. “They weren’t twenty years ago. These were the pictures six months before he died.”
“I just thought I was never going to get them back. I had left it alone,” said Chambers, who admits technology is not her thing. “I’m looking through and it was all gone. All gone.”
She’d given up. But then she crossed paths with Kenny Vasquez, an AT&T technician, at a city-sponsored event to aid seniors with tech support.
“She broke down how it happened ten months ago and how she accidentally selected them all and didn’t know how they got to be deleted,” Vasquez recalled.
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The AT&T technician did a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and there they were.
“I open the app and then you start seeing all the pictures pop up and I’m scrolling next to her and I’m like, ‘are these the pictures you lost?’ And she’s like, ‘yes!’ Her voice began to break, she starts tearing up. I’m caught off guard,” he shared.
“You brought joy to my life,” Chambers said to Vasquez. “You made a difference. In a matter of seconds.”
Vasquez says he won’t soon forget it.
“It means that much more,” he said. “ I’ve never met this person ever but the fact that I could impact her and move her to tears. I think I’m going to really cherish this memory.”
