so one of my summer projects is to go through all the pictures that are piled in boxes in the basement. i still dont know what im going to do with them but just try to organize them a little. this morning i decided to start...its kind of a scary project to start, daunting cause of how many unorganized pictures there are. so i went down stairs and grabbed a random box.
it started just random pictures of jes and i, a few here and there of eric, then i pulled out a folder. cards from the service, pictures of the service, newspapers articles before and after. thats the thing about this house. you never know what your gonna find, and more often than not in those boxes will be something that pings at your heart. sometimes i forget that its real. its just a story i've heard, something i feel, something we talk about and miss and a place we visit to celebrate a life we talk about. but they actually went through that. through him being born, spending week after week at the hospital, telling family, taking time off work, living in seattle for a summer. it actually was real. i love the pictures...i could look through pictures of them forever. A little family full of more love than anyone could ever know. But also, i'm an outsider looking in. I cant even wrap my mind around it. A whole family, dad playing with Eric and Jes, mom writing down all the bills, the days in the hospital, the blood counts, the insurance stuff....little Eric running around spreading love and joy and appreciation for life. And forever and always I will wish that I could have been there.
I found something Jesse wrote about him. About how he changed his life and taught him more than he would ever learn again, how he had to grow up fast and had this wise little boy to teach him. And all that has been passed to me in some form or another. But its hard not to wish we could just be a few young kids, playing, running home to mom and dad at the end of the day and all having dinner together. Thats such a distant thought, so far from reality, such a dream that I have had for as long as I can remember.
I hope that someday I can have that dream from the other end, that I can have littles playing together and have a whole family, and let my kids be young when they are young, and have ups and downs but do it together, and not have my kids look back at pictures and wonder how that family was ever one.
Its like they are different people in those pictures. Before they went through all the pain, before they were weathered, and tired, and had felt loss. Before they even had a clue how this life would turn out. And I do know those people, I see glimpse of them here and there, they love me and they've given me an amazing life. I see that mom on good days, when she talks about Eric, when I call her crying, when she's proud to watch me give a speech thanking people for a huge scholarship. I see that Dad when we ski and when we go to the lake, the few times I've caught him talking about Eric, when he gets to be outside, when he jokes with me, and I see the most of it in Jesse. Maybe he was young enough to hold onto all that and keep it all with him as he grew up. Maybe mom and dad gave me lots of what they were then. Maybe its in me, going places, seeing new things, finding peace at Eric's, playing outside and loving every minute of life.
Life is a crazy one. And every time I look through the pictures it feels a little different. I'm reminded that this all actually happened. And although I've just heard the stories and felt wanting to be there, they were there, they felt it all from the beginning to the end and today they still feel the loss everyday and miss that life that they know. Its like a different form of ignorance is bliss. That I cant quite explain but that I'm starting to understand, starting to understand how differently they felt it. Maybe someday we can bridge that gap of understanding or maybe we never will. And the bridge we will have is the four months that we were one family, that the three of us together brought them joy together, that we felt the pain together, that we sat in the living room or at the dinner table, a family of five with so much ahead of us.
We are lucky we really are. Its a lot to understand, a lot to feel, a lot to question. But we are all better for it, we learned so much from that boy. And maybe as I grow up and they grow up and we make sense of all this we can get closer, and I can try to understand what they feel, and be a little more sensitive and aware of how much they really did and do feel everyday. And maybe someday they can share those feelings with me. And maybe someday Jes's and I's families can be whole and can bring us all together as one family, a family who has felt the ups and downs together and loves each other and this life cause a little boy taught us how. Someday I hope each one of us can be whole as individuals and whole as a family, cause the pictures of that family look like a whole lotta love.
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