JMM is going through all our old photographs and digitizing them. It is a Herculean task as we have pictures going back to Creation, we probably have an old sepia print of the original Higgs Boson, but I digress. Some of the albums are composed of thick paper sheets with the pictures held in place with little sticky corner tabs. Others are more problematic in that they are in albums where the pictures are held in place on sticky sheets and covered in plastic. It is hard to get the pictures out without damaging them. Then there are the photos that have come loose and are not in an album at all. JMM asks me, who can barely remember yesterday, to identify the people, place, and date. Oddly enough, many times, I can.
So many of them are dead now. And for some, I may be the only person living who remembers them. It is to be expected as one gets older but it is still a lonely feeling. And memories do come flooding back.
Some of the pictures are of my three nieces, the daughters of my deceased older brother. One of the nieces died a year ago. They were such beautiful girls. But something went wrong and their lives went awry. I have spent much of yesterday and today wondering if I had stayed in closer contact with them, if things may have been different for them. I'll never know for sure but probably not. They had so much going against them: unstable parents, low educational attainment, no church, smoking & alcohol, serial relationships, and serial bad decisions.
It was and is just a sad, sad situation.
No comments:
Post a Comment