The hot water heater burst a couple of days ago. It's in the garage as I don't have a basement and the water had started to flood one side of the room. It just happened to be the side where there were boxes of photographs on the floor. (Don't get me started - I don't know why they were there EITHER!)
I rushed to unpack the pictures and lay the wet ones out on the kitchen table to dry. As I frantically laid them out, flashes of images came at me - Joanne sticking her tongue out playfully, Mom at her sewing machine, me looking short for a change standing next to a very tall Mike (6'8"), Gary with that grin that made the girls in high school giggle....
As I saw these split-second images speed past my line of vision, I started to feel this excruciating pain. I recognized it immediately even though the last time I felt it was when they had each died years ago. It was my heart breaking. It was such a devastating pain and it left me breathless and took me by surprise. It was a sudden tearing of my heart into tiny little pieces and it nearly doubled me over.
To see that part of my life again, visually in front of me - not just the little snippets I would very selectivley allow my mind to remember over the years - it nearly did me in. It left me shaking and pacing and finally, crumpled in a puddle of tears. It was the first time I realized how deeply I must have buried all of those memories. How far the human mind will go to survive....
I had a party a couple of years back and one of the guests asked me why I didn't have any photographs around - there were none on the walls, none on the end tables, none on the bookshelves - just...none. I mumbled and joked something about how I was too lazy to get them framed and up, but inside I knew the real reason. The real reason is because I couldn't stand to see the ones that I loved - that weren't around anymore - present in my daily life. I didn't feel that I was strong enough to see flashes of them as I ran back into the house to get Emma a towel on the way to swim practice, or while I watched TV or baked some cookies or or swept the floors or whatever else one does in their daily life. The memories of them - even the happy ones - were so terribly sad to me because they were over and there were no more opportunities to make any new ones with them. They were gone and it was forever.
The saddest part I realize now is that when I buried those memories, I buried some of the best parts of knowing these precious people in my life. My dear, artistic sister, Joanne; my tough, talented mother; my funny, eccentric brother Mike; and my brother, Gary, who was hard to live with but I believe (need to believe) he had a sensitive heart somewhere deep inside. These were members of my family. They lived and breathed and laughed and cried. They were real. They weren't people I read about in a book or saw in a movie. They weren't characters in a television sitcom or the latest dramatic film. I shared whole parts of my life with them. They existed in flesh and blood for me. The few memories of them that I would allow to bubble up to the surface of my consciousness weren't all that they were. They were so much more. To relegate them so the sidelines of my memory is so unfair to them.
I guess because their deaths just kept coming at me, one after another, in a relatively short amount of time (three of them in three-and-a-half years) my mind and heart were forced to go into survival mode which meant I was going to have to shelve my memories and grief about each one of them individually and just get on with whatever the next challenging situation brought me.
But the truth is, I am not doing them justice by merely surviving their deaths. I need to honor them by celebrating their lives.
So, in the coming months I'm going to spend some time remembering them here on my blog. I want anyone that might read this to know them better. And I want to remind myself how much I loved them and that it's okay that it still hurts to miss them.
I'm also going to cowboy up and make a commitment to try go through all of those photographs. I'm fearful about it from my reaction the other day but I think it's important to at least try. To let myself be reminded of all of those great times and those great people - those ones so dear to me. To let myself feel whatever comes. Frankly, I think it's going to suck. But, in the end, I hope that by doing it I'll be better able to get on with celebrating who they were and all that they meant to me. They deserve that.
And so do I.
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