Photos
Years ago for Christmas, our adult kids gave me a digital photo frame. They loaded some photos in it before it was wrapped, but, after Christmas, immersed in their busy lives, they didn’t send any more photos to the frame — until they came to visit, watched the photos flip through the frame, and realized their family wasn’t represented.
“What? You’ve got Goodwyn and Arden? No Juliet and Faye?” And then, our second son, the father of Juliet and Faye, would stand at the kitchen counter with his phone and send 187 photos of his kids to the digital frame. Even in their thirties, our kids are very competitive with each other. “There,” he’d say ten minutes later. “We have the most photos.”
When we lost our oldest son Steve, my husband and I relocated to Tennessee, and I brought pots and pans and clothes with us, but I didn’t move the digital photo frame. It stayed in our house in Florida. After 20 months in Tennessee, we moved back to our house in Florida, and the photo frame is still on the kitchen counter, stuck in time with photos from before. It’s the dividing page in the book of our lives, the pages of our lives before November 10, 2023. They’re photos of people we used to be, people who had it all. Now, we are different people. Our book lost one of its most important, most loved characters. And we know he won’t return to our pages again.
We wanted our story to end on November 10, but we realized it didn’t. The Author kept writing. We’re grateful for the characters. We love them so much. Our family has pulled together in ways that make me so proud. I have many photos of after November 10, 2023, photos of our three other adult children and their families, photos of our grandkids, and so I thought, let me add them to this frame. It’s time.
I couldn’t! Granted, this frame is old, and probably not the most expensive version on the shelf, but I spent an hour checking photos, emailing photos, unplugging the digital frame, replacing the cord, plugging it back in again, resetting the frame settings, trying again. No luck! Nice try, my frame seems to be saying to me. But I am “before”, and you can’t change a thing about me.
And we can’t. We’ll never understand why the Author wrote the story the way He did. We’ll never understand why Steve was taken from us. But we realize that although he’s not in our pages, in our photos, he’s the character that lives with us forever; he’s etched in our hearts, in our souls. He’s the character we’ll never stop thinking about, even after he’s gone.
I’m going to buy a new frame. I’ll add the photos from this current broken frame — our memories of before. Then, I’ll add photos from after because our grandkids like to watch the frame and look for themselves. And yes, because, despite our aching hearts, the second part of our story has to be lived and should be remembered. But mostly, the truth is, I’m going to buy a new frame because I really enjoy seeing my adult children get all indignant about not having as many family photos in the frame as their siblings. That just makes me smile. And I know little Steve is smiling, too, knowing that he’s the character we all miss, the one we wish was not just before, the one that will be with us always and forever.