{This story was meant for yesterday but my laundry issues of the day trumped it.}
I have a panic attack every time I see my laptop screen. It is filled (aka - cluttered) with hundreds of folders and files - my attempt at getting organized got the best of me. There are files that I pulled to work on, website links that had something interesting on them that I wanted to get back to and read, folders of photos I pulled from iphoto to create some sort of project... mostly everything I never got around to. It's as cluttered as the real files and folders in my room and in my mind. It's virtual clutter and it's ridiculous.
There's one folder marked wedding photos... there's a few from my own wedding but most are from the marriages of my parents and my inlaws. I never got around to scanning my own - I started with theirs. When I found out I was pregnant this last time I wanted to make a blurb book for our anniversary of the things we did in the 13 years we would have been married - since the next would be starting our new life with a new baby... it was going to be a lot of house and a lot of RoseBud and a lot of Disney with a lot of wedding throughout and I wanted to tie them all together. You know... walking down the aisle, cutting the cake, first dance, first ride as husband and wife starting their new life together...After all the events of the funeral and the gathering of photos, I had found a lot of similar shots and thought it would be cute to have them all together.
I wasn't there when my own mother died 17 years ago - I was at home in bed - in this house, actually. David was with me and my dog Gypsy. We never made it to the hospice in time. Honestly, after the whole gathering at the hospital when my mother-in-law took her last breath - I was happy. Not that she was gone, just that I was surrounded by these people that were as close to me as my own family and thought that if we could get through this - we could get through anything - together. I wanted to show that connection.
Both my father's and father-in-law's marriages ended because of health reasons - cancer killed their spouses. Mine was by choice. Not mine. A part of me still wants to make this book for myself and another knows that these photos will stay on this computer until it fizzles out and dies. I had made a collage some time ago for mum and dad's anniversary - I put their wedding picture in the center and surrounded it with each of their eight kids at their own weddings with them... just like we were at the hospital that night. I don't have a close up of it on this computer but it's the one in the gold frame.
I couldn't help thinking about that when I was last up at the gravesite and looked at Mum's stone - the stone layout I sketched up for Dad to proof - there in real life. Their wedding picture is right there in the middle with their wedding date in the intertwined rings.
It still kills me that I'm no longer in this picture (and family) anymore. I have to smile, though, when I see them sitting there arm in arm intertwined like the rings above. After all those years, with the good and the bad, they never let go.
Happy Anniversary.
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