“We take photos as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone.” — Katie Thurmes
As you will have guessed, this week has been gut wrenchingly emotional. I have cried more this week than I have in years. The layers of grief haven’t even really begun to peel back yet, and already, I feel I’ve been laid bare to the bones.
Like any loss, there have been hours spent wrestling with regrets and hurts and what should have been. I’m going to be unpacking those things for a long time. I have no doubt I’ll come out on the other end changed. How can I not?
My mother is buried now, laid to rest on a beautiful hilltop above a wide, fast river and near a bucolic cattle field. The next phase of the practical has begun; I spent part of yesterday dismantling her apartment and bringing to my own home the small bits of her life’s effects that I will eventually fold into my own.
I’m not a things person, so this step has been difficult. It’s been my husband, mostly, who has helped me along, saying, “If you think you might want it later, take it now,” and urging me to think ahead towards keepsakes for our children. I brought home my mother’s beloved antique secretary desk, boxes of her china and kitchen goods, and a frightening number of figurines and whatnots. I’m vaguely uncomfortable with all of it; every bit of it feels like stolen goods somehow, like items I need to return to their rightful owner. They’re not mine, they don’t belong here. I know their places: the spot in the living room where the secretary should stand, the exact place the owl statuette should perch. These are my mother’s things. Why are they in my house?
But I did bring home something I am beyond thrilled to have: photos.
Like many adults whose childhoods were interrupted by acrimonious divorces, I’ve spent my entire adult life with only a handful of images of my earliest years. After my father left, my mother secreted away the evidence of her 20 year marriage to my father— and with it, photographs of our life as a family.
Suddenly, I find myself in the possession of three entire boxes of photos. Three boxes. Can you feel my joy?
I’ve already spent hours—hours— pouring over them. Remembering moments. Marveling at faces. Peeking, for a moment, into life before I was born, and while I was little, and even after I had moved to college and beyond.
I have laughed and cried, felt sadness and joy. The memories of holding my beloved baby brother in my arms, of giggling with cousins in matching nightgowns, of my mother trimming my hair, of my Papaw carrying me on his shoulders…these moments have been so close to the surface as I’ve looked at these images that I would almost swear they were just yesterday. Too, looking into the face of my Mamaw as a 30-something mother standing between her three handsome teenage sons, or seeing my mother and her siblings in frilly church clothes posed on a hill has been a poignant reminder of where I come from and how I got here.
I thought these photographs were gone forever, victims of time and a broken heart. Seeing them again has given me a deep happiness even as it has bruised my heart to know how it is that I’ve come to have them. I wonder, as I sort through images, if these snapshots are the first step in healing not only my brokenness at the loss of my mother, but something deeper I’ve carried with me for decades. I wonder if these photographs have a place in the work God is doing in mending the pieces of my spirit that were crushed when my parents’ marriage imploded. I’m not sure yet. But seeing the faces of the past staring back at me, I wouldn’t be surprised.