Photo memory and realities

Yesterday, I was served up yet another Facebook “Memory”, this time for a photo I made my Facebook cover photo. As always, it sparked all sorts of memories and thoughts, which I share on my personal Facebook:

This was one of my favourite photos of the kids as they waited for their other daddy to get home from work. All four of them are gone now.

Around a year and a half after I took this photo, we all moved to the southern edge of the Manukau Harbour, and a little more than a year after that, Leo joined our family. Some nine months later, we lost Bella, seven months after that, we lost their other daddy, nearly a year and a half later, Sunny left us, and Jake around seven months after that. Sometimes even I’m shocked I managed to survive all that loss so close together.

I still have the mat Jake and Sunny are laying on, and the dog rope, too—though no one plays with it anymore. On the other hand, I’ve upgraded my phone several times and my photos have much better resolution now—and the fact that was one of the first things I thought when this photo popped up in my FB “Memories” is an indication of healing (so called…). The fact I remember in detail when each member of our family left us shows that healing from grief isn’t actually a thing: We adapt, we grow around it, we move forward with it, but usually without the searing pain it once produced. I miss them all as much as ever, and I can tell that Leo does, too, but we have each other and some days that’s everything.

After I posted that, I naturally wondered if I’d shared that photo on this blog ten years ago, but I hadn’t at all in all of July 2015. Today, I looked though my stored photos and I found the original, which I took on June 5, exactly a month before I made it my Facebook cover photo. That’s not remotely important—the date I took the photo and the date I made it my FB cover photo were both ten years ago, and the real point wasn’t the date, it was how much things had changed since then.

The whole thing gave me a chance to underscore the fact that grief never diminishes or ends, instead, we grow around it. I’ve talked about this many times, and I’ll talk about more into the future because I think it’s the biggest thing that people don’t understand about grief, and also what they most need to understand.

Still, the photo I took ten years ago was a great example of what my life was like only a decade ago. I miss that life, everyone I’ve lost. But I’m still here, and so is Leo, and together we continue moving forward. And that’s the way of things.