The morning after you died I searched for a picture
to give to the newspaper. The crash that took your life was world news, national news... local news, too. They would ask for a picture. Why didn’t I have one great picture of you ready to take out of a frame?
I set aside dozens... even hundreds of pictures culled from boxes that had been awaiting some other day, some other year, some other decade for my attention. I always meant to fill albums and fill frames and fill in with words the stories every picture told.
The sum of all sadness I have felt before Is dwarfed by the sadness I feel from knowing you are gone. But the image of your face reminds me in picture after picture that you are one of the privileged who loved life and lived life, never wasting a day. You were a baby, a boy, a young man whose smile could light the darkest day. In this summer of your leaving... in this summer of dark days, I settle for being grateful that maybe I was a mom too busy taking pictures to do anything with them.
