Keep them as long as you want. Leave them on display or tucked away. All is up to you and what makes you feel better. I kept Don's pictures out for years. I still have a lot tucked away that I had displayed before. It's about you now and no one else so don't let others tell you how to grieve. That would be my advice.

The same thing goes for wearing your wedding band. Only you decide how long you wear it. Sharon

Sharon's right ... do whatever YOU want to do.

I have pictures of my husband on display.
We still have a landline phone with an answering machine, and there's messages from him that I will never erase.

I'm comforted by looking at pictures of happy times together.

Wishing you peace.
Hugs,
Janie

Oh how I wish I had texts, voicemails or answering machine messages fro my husband, but I don't. I would keep them forever. I have pictures of him as a screensaver on my computer, on my phone and all over the house. I don't care what anyone else thinks. This is my grief and I am the one living it not them. Do what works for you. If you erase them you can never get them back.

My son wanted to keep his dad's outgoing voice mail message and so did I. Those who are more savvy can do this themselves, but I took our phones to a cell phone provider office with tech support on site and a very nice and understanding man created files for our phones and the audios are stored there. I was afraid we would accidentally delete them. I don't know if the same can be done for text messages. Unfortunately, I had deleted a number of them from my husband just before he died. Pictures, yep, I have them on display.

I treasure all of the pictures I have of my wife. I wish I had more. She hated to have her picture taken. I was always sneaking pictures of her and it was often her walking away. She accused me of taking pictures of her butt. I was just trying to get any pictures of her. It was funny though. I have some texts. If you have a smart phone there are some 3rd party software that you can download them as a PDF. I did that with my iPhone. Her and I would email each other while each of us were at work. Sometimes quite lengthy conversations. They were never deleted and I have several years of those. I sometimes reread them. We met back in the late 60's because our fathers started talking to each other on the CB radio and became friends. I have a recording of her and I talking to each other one early morning in 1970 on the CB radio. 2 years before we were married. I play that often.

I treasure any connection I can make with her so as not to forget, like I could forget, but it's comforting to remember we had each other...

I haven,many photos of Ben, my husband, during his drastic treatments for AML leukemia. I can't bear to look at them.
Then I have all of the photos of him before he got that disease I treasure those photos, however, It's too painful now to look at any pictures of his suffering. I
I do have a large photo of him next to my bed, which I kiss him on the lips,every night and every morning. ( I always kissed him gently even when he was dying, I still remember how he gently kissed me back. I feel the same kisses when I kiss his photo. Really strange but true!

I have one recording of him singing a song that he wrote for my birthday, It is a powerful song of his liove for me. I hold on to that forever and thank The Lord for that gift.
It is wonderful to have these treasures.
thanks for your post,
Sandra.

Sharon's advice about the wedding ring. At the moment I can't see myself ever taking it off.
Sandra

You are blessed to have all pics, texts and voice mails. Keep them where you want and for as long as you want.
I have many pics and some wonderful videos( haven't been able to watch them ..someday!!). I do wish I had our old vboiuce mail messages but his phone quite working when he was in the hospital never to work again and I too lost them all when I had to get a new phone. Such precious memories my friend
Hugs
Deb

My reactions to these was different at different stages in the grief process. Early on I found them incredibly painful to see and hear. I now have come full circle and they are a tremendous source of comfort and happy memories for me. That was my journey. Gerry (they did a video of my wife's funeral against my wishes. That is the only video I refuse to watch)

Early on I'd go thru all our photos and let the tears flow. It was a release I needed at the time. I have saved some of her facebook posts. Reading and re-reading them has been comforting to me. I have her journals from the last 2 years of her life and they've helped me see and more fully understand our relationship and her journey towards death thru her eyes. She was a Methodist pastor and I have a couple of years of her recorded sermons. In the first few months getting to sleep was very difficult. I began to listen to her sermons and found sleep came much more easily. At first I felt really guilty, falling asleep in the middle of a sermon, but I realized that the sound of her voice was so missed and so soothing that it outweighed the content at that point in time.

Ten months out now and with very few exceptions, seeing her pictures triggers the happy memories of the point in time they were taken. I'm glad too that I have her recordings. Sometimes still, hearing her voice is just what I need. At first I held onto these things so tightly, somehow worried that without them close, memories of her would fade or disappear but thru this I've seen that she left the most indelible of marks on my life, something that can never be erased.
Peace and ((hugs)
John

I have pictures of my husband all over the tiny house. I bring different photo to the office and place it at the line of sight. It brings comfort and calms me down when I am stressed at work. He would e-mail me from overseas and I have all of them. I have one voice mail he had called me on mother's day from overseas. He died a couple of days later. I will forever treasure that message. It calms me.

One of my hobbies is photography. I took many pictures of my husband and had others take them at occasions we went to. Sometimes I would take candid shots of him at home, fixing things, cooking, shoveling snow, etc. During the months after, I started putting together photos chronicling from our dating days. I wrote comments on cards describing as best I could what the occasion was and what I was feeling. It took me five months to complete before I finished the part before he died. After his death, I continued with the title "Life Even After" and am now photographing what I am doing. I am up to approximately 600 pages of photographs with comments. I will stop photographing at New year's eve, which was our first date 36 years ago. It was our second marriage and he was my first true love.