Tuesday, June 30, 2009

More Roger-free Zones

On Friday, I finally did it.
I removed all the wedding photos from their frames and from the walls and replaced them.
It was hard.
It was sad.
It was nice to look at the pictures and remember the day.
But also sort of annoying that it is over.
And not just the wedding day but that time and chapter of my life.

The honeymoon pictures came down as well.
Remembering all the fun times.
Remembering how I freaked out one night at dinner when I realized I was actually married and marriage is forever and found myself crying in a bathroom.
That little moment only lasted about fifteen minutes when I realized I had married a wonderful guy and it will all be okay.

There is only one picture left hanging.
It is of Grace, Roger, and his mom from the first weekend I met the majority of Roger's family.
It is a 4x6 in a collage of pictures.
Which will be moved in time to my office.
For now, it is in the family room.
I can glance at it when I want but since it is in a collage it is surrounded by other friends and family photos.

Now, I am not sure what to do with all those photos.
I am thinking of putting them all along with the candid shots that I took out of other frames into an album of sorts.
But at the same time I almost do not want to spend the time.
Why should I?
So they are just grouped together?
Will I ever feel good enough to flip through them without longing to go back?
For things to be different than they turned out for us?
To sit and look at him and not believe that he actually died?
I mean, Roger, of all people?
How can he be gone?

All the photos are off the walls.
Gone like him.

Then I removed some more of his decor.
Replaced it with my photography.
In my bedroom, I changed out my duvet.
Changing up the bedroom just a bit more.
It looks nice.

It looks different.
It all looks different without him.
My life.
My house.
And me.

Sigh.

3 comments:

Jacki said...

Okay, here is my opinion, FWIW: I think you should make a scrapbook out of all those pictures. There's this belief out there that scrapbooks should be only for happy times and show only happy pictures, but I believe that they should be a window into your life. It's okay to scrapbook about hard, sad times - don't feel pressured to make it all sunshine and rainbows. My mom was a huge scrapbooker when it was popular, and she actually had a whole magazine on "tribute scrapbooking." These may help:
http://tinyurl.com/mqxrdm
http://tinyurl.com/mltyu7

Candice said...

It helped me immensely to move, to have different things around me instead of being surrounded by a shrine to my former life. But as I moved--twice, actually--some things still stay, and some have become more important to me as time goes on. Some of the pictures are the same as before, but most are different...or at least they're rearranged or reclassified differently.

I took my favorite photos (or some/many of them) of Charley and put them all in one SUPER larger collage frame at my house in Sandy, a while after I moved into it. It helped to have the photos still up and out somewhere, but on a side hallway that I didn't see that often and not in a Charley Shrine fashion. I haven't quite decided what to do with it now, in the new house, though; it's too big for my wall space and I don't really want it in the main rooms...just feels odd to have it too prominently.

I kept thinking I should do something with all the pictures I have. Maybe make a nice scrapbook (although I am NOT a scrapping kind of person), or at least take the effort to combine them into a mundane photo album. SOMETHING. But I don't. Not worth the effort, and somehow it's more comforting to be to thumb through a stack of photos and not really know what order or direction they'll be in or what one comes next. The randomness of it appeals to me these days, I guess. But for now it's enough to simply know that they're somewhere and (loosely) in one place when I need them (which isn't often).

Then again, I have all the photos from the last 4-6 years on my computer too as my screen saver, so I "see" pictures of him all the time. So apparently lazy/random mode really IS my choice du jour. ;o)

Hugs!

Roads said...

I moved those pictures, too.

For what it's worth, I think a date should be understanding when you have a million photographs around the place, but at the same time it just didn't feel right. Not really.

So I moved them. I know where they are -- in easy reach, but no longer on the fireplace.

I'd like to say that it didn't feel like a betrayal, but naturally it did. Big time. But a necessary one, if life was going to move forwards.

It has. But of course, I would have done anything to make life different, so that it didn't have to.

That's tough work, well done. Spirits up.