Photographic Memory

My phone had something like a near-death experience last week and, for a while, it seemed that the only way to fix it would be to get rid of a large number of copies of photos and videos stored there. That didn’t actually help the phone problem, but it did force me to confront an issue I’ve been dancing around for nearly two years.

Pictures of Colin throw me a bit for a loop. We do have a handful of photos we have on permanent display in the kitchen, living room and hallway … and I’ve gotten used to those, even treating them a little bit like old friends. I smile at them when I see them and tell him hello. If someone in the household is giving me attitude, I might confer with him via his photo. Maybe he has an idea on how to deal with teenagers.

But I’m leery about looking at other photos of him. Christina will, from time to time, tell me that she’s found this or that photo that she’d forgotten she had and try to show it to me. As often as not, I’ll beg off. Photos are fine. Watching previously unseen video of him comes with this bittersweet reminder of there was everything he could have been, right there on Christina’s screen, whereas the fact that he’s not there is pretty much etched into every corner of our household.

I did manage to look at one a while ago. It must have been from 2017. He was in the backyard with Ricardo, who was showing him how water came out of the house. It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but there he was, in our backyard, getting his hands washed out of a house before scampering away. And then you look up into the real backyard and there’s no escaping it … there’s no Colin here.

The trip through my phone’s photo banks wasn’t so bad. Perhaps it was a good thing that I’d watched the video Christina had … the first video I’ve agreed to watch in a while. Perhaps that steeled me. But I kept noticing as the phone demanded I delete more to free up space, that I wasn’t willing to delete a single photo of Colin. And I’ve got backups of all of these photos on my laptop and a hard drive. The best ones are even printed out. So, deleting one of these images from my phone is not a big ask. And, at the same time, delete anything to do with Colin? Hell no.

But all the memories are tricky. At Thanksgiving, Ricardo told us how Colin would visit him in his room to listen to his music and then, sometimes, fall asleep wrapped in a blanket in front of the big window overlooking the back yard. I didn’t know any of my children were capable of peacefully drifting off to sleep, much less that this was something that happened with any regularity. I mean, of course, Ricardo had a whole relationship with Colin that didn’t involve me, but you also don’t expect to find out your dead pre-schooler had a whole schtick that he carried out without your ever knowing about it.

The memories are tricky. The kids are still much more prone to bring up Colin, and we can have a laugh at some old memories. And then they’ll go a step too far. Remember the time Colin got Emma in the face with the garden hose? General laughter. Can we talk about what kind of tumor he had? Stony silence. Remember how much he loved the Flash? Good memories. What would have happened to Colin if he were alive during the pandemic. Oh no, there is no way we’re having that conversation.

I suppose it’s the nature of this beast. Every time one thing starts feeling a little more normal, it opens up another chapter in the process that reminds you how off all of this is. But, for now, my phone is working again, and all the photos of Colin are still there. I just don’t look at them much.