Linda Martin-Hellyer uses photography to remember her late husband -- and heal her grief.

Every morning, Linda Martin-Hellyer picks up her Canon camera and takes a walk. Over four to six miles, taking a slightly different route each day, the Pacific Grove resident trains her lens on whatever happens to catch her attention at that moment. “Lately it’s been cormorants,” she says, going on to gush about how quickly the baby birds are growing up. “I’m seeing [the area] a whole other way.”

After her walk, Martin-Hellyer heads home, chooses her favorite images and uploads them to a blog. The whole process takes five or six hours, she says. “I didn’t realize it was going to take so much when I got started.” But that’s OK. This is a grand gesture.

Martin-Hellyer’s husband, Philip Hellyer, the love of her life, died July 9, 2020 at the age of 46 after a four-and-a-half-year battle with brain cancer. Because it was the middle of the pandemic, she couldn’t hold any kind of memorial. Instead she decided, on Dec. 31, 2020, to embark on a big project – 365 days of images. The gesture was partially inspired by the movie Forest Gump, Martin-Hellyer says, a favorite of Phil’s. Her photos are of animals (seagulls, otters, a recent series of squirrels), the ocean, flowers, cool cars. She adds photos of Phil, too, and little notes addressed to him. She writes about how she’s feeling, how the grief is treating her that day.

But let’s go back to the beginning. Linda and Phil met in 1995 in Santa Barbara. At that time she owned two stores – a new baby items store and a used baby items store. Phil worked for her. “It’s a little scandalous,” she says now, laughing. Their friendship solidified when Linda got into a car accident and Phil helped care for her. That was Phil – always helping people even when Linda wished, just a little, that he wouldn’t. By October of 1997 they were together – a “passionate, romantic” relationship, she says.

Still, it took Phil a while to convince Linda to marry him. Phil was 17 years Linda’s junior, an age gap she couldn’t help but fixate on. What if he wanted to be with someone younger, someone his own age? She’d been married before and had two daughters. Looking back now, her hesitation around the age gap is her biggest regret. “It didn’t make any difference. We just really liked each other.”

Phil and Linda ran away together, first to Florida, which they “hated.” Next they moved to Arkansas and lived in a town called Eureka Springs. During that time Phil worked as a firefighter. Eventually, in 2005, they married and moved to the Monterey Peninsula.

Looking back on it now, she should have known something was wrong, even before his diagnosis. Always a kind, fun, open man, Phil’s behavior started to change, he became quicker to anger. He also lost a lot of weight – but then again he was working hard in the auto repair shop he owned. It wasn’t until early 2016, when Phil suffered a massive seizure, that everything changed.

Linda is grateful for the years they had together post-diagnosis of his brain cancer. They were side-by-side constantly, either in the hospital or at home or on short travels. This is when the walks started, and the photography and the writing. It was soothing for Phil to walk by the ocean, she says. And he liked that she was sharing their story on her blog.

When Phil’s health started to decline at the beginning of the pandemic, at a time when even family members were no longer allowed inside hospitals, Linda’s daughter stayed with them so he could be at home, with Linda. “I’m not a nurse, let’s get that clear,” she says. “But you do what you have to do.” And when he died, “I kept on walking. Somehow it made me feel a little closer to him.”

Now that Linda is just over halfway through her 365 days of photos, she reflects that it has been a therapeutic project. “I can put my love into those images,” she says. And the writing – “Instead of carrying [the grief] around with me I can write it away.

“I wonder what will happen when it ends,” she says.

You can follow Linda’s photography journey on her blog at monsieuraleon.blogspot.com