#11 - Memory
They’re dead but not gone; those that we love live on for as long as we remember…
“God, I hate the cancer pictures.”
Thankfully, memory is subjective. We can take the good and toss the bad at the bottom of a bin, lock it away, forget about it. Only the good remains - an old fishing hat in need of a good wash, but too precious to risk; an even older woman (his mother) covered from head to toe in rainbow stickers, her grandchildren giggling on either side of her; a fifteen year old boy grinning from ear to ear as he sets off a pilfered M80 in the back yard and his friends cheer.
The pictures are hand selected. In the pictures, he's cancer free. He isn’t smiling either, but we pretend.
Years later we will sit around telling stories:
“Remember a few years back when…” -- "And Randy spilled all of the beer..." -- “And we took that picture…” -- “And he was smiling.”