Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Pictures of Before

From the very beginning of this new life in which loss and grief are major players, I’ve had difficulty with photographs.  I love taking pictures, especially self-portraits, and I take them almost constantly.  So when our daughter died abruptly and without known cause, it hurt to return from the hospital without our daughter and see the photographs from Before.  I felt like they had betrayed me.  Shouldn’t I have known that something so horrible was about to happen?  Shouldn’t there have been a warning hidden within those photographs?

I combed through them, looking for some sort of sign of the horror that had come upon us so suddenly.  I had taken pictures up until the day she died . . . but of course there were no warning signs in them when I searched them from my new life in After. . . .
 
Today I am writing over at Still Standing Magazine!  

2 comments:

  1. Hi, I thought that your article was full of familiar pain but also heart warming. I too find that looking backwards brings me no answers even though I repeatedly look for them. Its so, so true, I found that I greived for myself as well as my child. I felt the person I was, optomistic, fun & happy was dead too. Perhaps now I should think of myself as a pheonix, brought back to life with the appearance of being the same. Best wishes.Sally X

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    Replies
    1. Oh I love te imagery of a Phoenix, Sally! That's so apt.

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"I am glad you are here with me."
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King