See The Touching Way This Mom's Late Twin Boys Were Photoshopped Into Family Portrait

When Katy Patten reached out to photographer Linda Gittins to shoot a family photo, she mentioned that she didn't have many professional photos of their whole family together.

That family included not just her husband, Justin, and their two girls, baby Giuliana and 3-year-old Ava, but it also included twin boys Aiden and Gavin – who passed away shortly after they were born, nearly four months preterm, in 2011.

They didn't want to hide the fact that two children were missing from their family, so in May, Katy and Justin held their daughters as they posed for Gittins' camera — and then waited patiently as Gittins, the owner of Lulu B. Photography, got to work making their idea a reality.

It wouldn't be the first time a family has paid respect to a deceased relative in a photo, but Gittins found a way to make the image of the complete Patten clan truly unique. To portray the late sons, she superimposed shadows of her 4-year-old neighbor onto the image, holding their parents' empty hands. The result? "Such a special photo for this beautiful family," Gittins said on her Facebook page, that showcases the boys at the age they would have been when the portrait was taken.

And in her caption of the photo, she quoted children's author Robert Munsch: "'I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, as long as I'm living, my baby you'll be.'"