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Posts Tagged ‘photo’

On the Eve of His 21st Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on September 11, 2025| 18 Comments »


 
 
There is a joy that chases sadness
and sometimes overtakes it, as if
the two are racing down a hill,
their shadows sometimes merging—
and this is how a woman looking at a photo
of her son when he was still alive,
his face radiant with elation,
might find herself not knowing
if her tears are made of gratefulness
or sorrow, two parallel emotions
that sometimes twine inside us.
Nor does it matter to her.
Gratefulness. Sorrow. It seems right
she should weep either way.
Both feelings are fashioned from love.
She is here for all of it.
The salt tastes just the same.

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Framing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 20, 2025| 11 Comments »



In the photo on my phone, my son stands beside
a key deer, one hand limp at his side, the other
extending toward the spindly creature,
his delighted gaze on me where I stand behind
the camera. I don’t remember why he’s wearing
a shoelace tied around his head, but
his hair is bunched up and the look on his face says
he is both frightened by the deer and longing
to be closer to it. Oh, to love what we don’t understand. It
is ten years before he will take his life.
There are no clues in this photo of the tears.
The way his eyes will dull to black. The empty room.
The choice he made in that doorway.
No, in this photo, the aperture is still wide and
the Florida light reflects off his still-blonde
hair. What’s to come is more blurred than
the tropical trees behind him and the deer. Here, he is
still so curious about what might happen next, and
me, though I know now will happen in his story, it
doesn’t stop me from loving the boy
in that photo. Nor does it stop me from
loving him now. That love still framing
my life.

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On a Thursday Afternoon

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on January 13, 2023| 7 Comments »

We sit on the carpet in the entry,
and Vivian balances her ring
on the head of the cat and
for a long time we stay like this,
speaking of school and friends
The phone doesn’t ring.
The texts don’t chime.
The afternoon light
seems to hold each thing in its place
like photo corners in a scrapbook
and minutes stretch into forever.
There is a wholeness to the moment
so perfect I almost try to escape it.
Instead I stay and fall deeper
into the pages of this simple story.
A girl. A mother. A cat. An afternoon.
The certainty there’s nowhere else to be.
 

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When Facebook Shared a Photo from Eleven Years Ago Today

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 4, 2022| 6 Comments »




My son is wearing a black cardboard hat
with a golden tassel for kindergarten graduation.
He still has all his baby teeth, and his grin
is full of gaps and pride. He’s carrying
a yellow dandelion as if it’s a prize.
I love you, I say to the boy in the picture.
I love you, I say to the boy in my heart.

There are some who live their whole lives
without ever knowing they are loved.
Staring at his photo, I take comfort
in knowing he knew. Though his life was short,
though the world was too much,
here’s a picture of a boy
who knew he was loved.

Later that day, we went to the fair
and I followed him through fun house mirrors.
We slid on gray carpets down carnival slides
and he threw darts to hit balloons.
Later that night, I would have tucked him into bed,
sung him his song, kissed his head
and told him I was glad to be his mom.

I am still glad, eleven years later,
to be his mom. Knowing all that I know
about how he will grow and how he will hurt
and how he will go, I’ve never loved him more.
I open like a dandelion as I stare
at the photo of the ripening boy,
this boy I’m still getting to know.

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Looking at the Photo from Twelve Years Ago

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 15, 2021| 8 Comments »




Tonight I stare at the photo
of you and me and the cat
and the wooden train tracks
and I can’t stop marveling how
your head angles so neatly
into my shoulder, how my
body angles so easily into
yours. And I see how, even
now, after you’re gone,
I am still angling toward you,
my whole self somehow
defined by the space
where you’ve been. Today,
someone asked if it
was too hard to think
of the happy memories.
No. I love them. And I love,
impossibly, the hardest
of memories, too. It is
so easy now to love
the all of you. Remember
how many times we built
those wooden tracks?
And then pulled them apart,
only to build them again?
What isn’t a teacher for love?
Even then we were learning
about dead ends. Even then
we were learning how things
circle, how things change.

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