Day 37: Picture Frames

Before she passed away, my grandmother kept a table by the north-facing window in her second floor apartment. She lined the table with family photographs and crouched over it in her old wooden chair with a flower embossed red plastic backing.  She held her rosary beads in her soft, white, wrinkled hands, praying for all of us. She was deeply religious her entire life and as she sat in her hospital bed she said she could see Mother Mary, come to lead her to heaven. My father bent down and searched beyond the window, but couldn't see the visions that were so clear to her. She died twice in the hospital. My mother received a phone call from the doctor to say she'd passed. Ten minutes later we got a second call saying she was alive and fully coherent. She hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to her grandchildren, she said, so she'd returned. We went up to the hospital that night. I waited in the antiseptic hallway, afraid to go in and say goodbye. Eventually, I went into the room. She was pale and and worn, but content, at ease. She passed away a few days later and this time we buried her by her husband who had gone to an early grave 40 years prior.

My parents have a few framed pictures hanging in their living room. Above the fireplace, a photograph of them in their wedding wear, but, strangely, not from their wedding day. The picture is so faded the white of my mother's plain dress blends with her skin and my father's pale blue suit. Her dark curly hair and glasses are all that stand out. To the left, a photograph of my brother and me from when I was an infant and he was four. He's holding me in his lap, both of us are looking at the camera and smiling wide. To the right, a family photograph taken at the same time as the picture of my brother and I. It's the mid-eighties, but my parents are still dressed as if it's the 70s. My father has more hair and longer sideburns, he looks younger, happier. My mother is wearing a form-fitting dress, her hair cropped short on the sides and fuller on top. My brother is helping to hold me as I shine a toothless grin from my mother's lap.  Our yearbook photos hang on another wall on either side of a window. Neither of us looks much different than we did then. On another wall, a photograph of me from a dance recital wearing too much make-up and a long black ballet costume. A final picture of my husband and I at our wedding hangs on the third wall. We look young, naive.

While my husband was in Germany and Iraq, I kept framed pictures of him on my bureau. In the green wooden frame with the shamrock pattern I kept a photograph of him sitting in my passenger seat. We spent most of the first year of our relationship in my car, sitting for hours and talking or listening to music. He was wearing a green shirt, Fighting Irish baseball hat, and a sly smile. He'd lose the cushioning in his cheeks a few months later in basic training. In the second frame pictured above, I kept a picture that I took of us, also in my car, when he was home for leave on his nineteenth birthday. I bought a new dress for the occasion and he wore his Class As to a restaurant where we were ridiculously out of place. We pressed our foreheads together to take the picture. When you only see someone two or four weeks a year it's hard not to be in a state of bliss when you're together.

When he got out of the army I framed several pictures of him and his friends from Iraq. They lined our mantle above our non-functioning fireplace. When he left, he took the pictures out and left the frames exactly where they'd been. I found pictures for a few of them, but the two frames pictured above remind me too much of him.

Maybe someday I'll muster up the nerve to ask my parents if they plan to take my wedding picture down or if they think it will fade forever on the wall until even our smiles have disappeared into the bright white wear of light.