This is a post I wrote a while ago and just haven’t published.  I did update the times to reflect how long we have been living with empty frames. 😉

In a grief group I attended, I remember watching a video…one of many about dealing with loss. In the video a woman talked about getting out and looking at the pictures of her late husband, and her children’s father. They would look at them together and “boo hoo” (as she called it) over them. One day her children asked her why she continued to get out the pictures and look at them, why did she want to make them all sad. And she told them, “we are already sad. These pictures are good memories and good for our hearts to heal.” She said she would continue to get them out and look at them until getting them out wasn’t always so sad, but involved good memories too. Where they could enjoy it and reminisce and be glad for the experiences and the time they had to share.

This was profound for me at the time, and maybe even more so now. We were already sad. I think remembering him is helpful for the healing. It gives us a context, helps us to remember his charisma, his expressions, his passions, and his evolution over time to the man and father he was when he passed. He had a big life, a full life. Seeing it in pictures helps me to remember he lived! He really lived. It can put aside some of the guilt I may have for feeling like he didn’t get to do all the things he was supposed to or wanted to do. Maybe there was not a bucket list he completed, but there was a continual journey. There were great friends, great times, great family experiences, and he absolutely adored being a dad. He lived!

So today, getting out the photo albums brings much more joy than sorrow, and much more perspective than guilt. That said, I can put the album away, close the book on the memories when I need to. But I have a wall full of empty picture frames. Why, you may ask? Good question. They are hard to fill. I have took down a lot of the pictures in the first year, just because a lot of them were hard, and the house felt frozen in time. It was sort of as if we were still living in the day when things happened. I moved some things, painted some things, changed some things. In doing so, almost all of his pictures are down. I planned to put new ones up with him and the boys. I wanted to get new frames and arrange them differently. Just give it some newness…but when it came time to print the pictures and fill the frames. I became paralyzed. I realized that I had been less depressed since removing the constant reminders of him missing. And the photos remaining of him, I had become desensitized to. I knew I would need to desensitize myself to a whole new set of photos…and in some ways I just wanted to be happy. I wanted to ignore the feelings that lingered under the surface and stay in a more mended place. And so although I hung the frames, I hung them with their stock photos…awkward. This was only supposed to be for a few weeks at most. It has been 5 months. About two or three months ago I felt ready, and had been able to go through photos and successfully select some to print…without becoming a complete mess. And then I asked my oldest if he would like to help me pick a few to put on the wall…and to my surprise, he quickly said no, I’m not ready. Oh…..ok. We waited.

After coming home from church a couple months ago I found the boys on the living room floor carefully flipping the pages of the photo album their dad had created before he died. The one he was going to add to frequently and had taken a weird interest in putting together. It wasn’t normally his thing to be sentimental. But he was very into this book and these photos. He proudly showed them off to friends and family who visited over the holidays before he died. I remember looking at it after coming home from the hospital and thinking how it was like he knew. The album includes many pictures of him, even baby and kid pictures. But also lots of the family and him with the kids, and activities. It is a great history of him…and us. I found them looking at it. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to make a deal of it. I left them to it. But they left the album in my room and later that afternoon and I found myself flipping through it. Remembering. Crying. Embracing all the great that I see in the boys that comes from him.

We are ready to fill those frames. He will forever be their dad, and I want them to know as much about him as they can. And if they can remember his face, I don’t want them to forget it. And one of the things these pictures show, is how much he loved them. And how happy they were when he was alive. Hearts full…make faces brighter. They have hallowed since he is gone, but they are not lost forever. Their shine will return, it is returning. It has to, because there dads genes are shiny in them.

Now my issue is time and laziness.  Ha!  Can’t win.