pictures and words

We were together two decades but divorced before smart phones were a thing, so pictures of us were taken by cameras and then stashed in drawers or boxes and who knows where those all went. I haven’t been able to look through the box yet, the one I picked up from you out at the old farmhouse, you standing in the shade of a big tree, H. going in and out, V. running back and forth as I selected what books to take. I don’t remember what we chatted about. Your attitude was friendly. You did not seem like someone who had something to tell me.

If you were thinking about how it was likely the last time we would ever see each other again, I can remember no indication and I’ve wracked my brain. Your eyes seemed bright. I thought it was because you were happy but maybe I was seeing the shine of incipient tears, or tears that had already been shed, back home, with R. I see you standing there, in what was the dining room of the old farmhouse. I feel you watching me and V. She runs off on a mission to get some things I might want. Maybe you were planning to tell me but then H. came in. You did say in your email, later, that there never seemed to be a right time, suggesting you came with the intention to tell, suggesting that you were looking for openings. Were you feeling sad?

I’m glad you at least wanted to tell me in person. I guess it would not have been better, not really. There was H. and V. to consider. There would have been no heart to heart conversation. I’m sure you considered the spectre of me absorbing the shock of the whole thing in front of you. Maybe you knew you couldn’t see that without crying for yourself, and didn’t want to do that in front of me (or, more likely, V.). Then there was also the distance the pandemic put between us, of course. No one was hugging, not just us. I assured you H. and I had been careful on our trip, in case you were worried about us standing indoors talking together but you were unconcerned, sharing that you were all vaccinated which was something of a surprise as no one was back then. So that was a clue, which I picked up, but didn’t connect to anything. You, of course, had already gone through many rounds of treatment.

Later, I saw a brief sign of physical weakness as you navigated the slight slope of the hill on the lawn. I almost mentioned it to H., speculating to myself that it was related to the surgery from a few years back.

Maybe nothing would have been different at all had you told me then, but I doubt it. I know myself and I know I might have at least taken a picture of you with V., using V. as the cover reason, and I would have been oh so careful of your hope, I would not have said goodbye in any kind of final way but rather goodbye in a ‘good luck be strong see you again when I come pick up all this stuff after the pandemic’ kind of way (and saving any propensity towards tears for much later). I know I would have watched you every last second I could, I know I would have been unable to take my eyes off of you until you were completely out of sight. Or so I tell myself.

It is eerie, how much my last moments with your dad are so like my last moments with you. The farmhouse, the hidden illness, the long drives on country roads to get there, and leave. The elegiac sunlight.

I go back again and again to that last picture. Is the towel the same? I’ve blown it up to gargantuan size and brought the matching towel in from my bathroom. At first I became convinced it was not; now, I am convinced - no, I know - it is. And then I shifted the picture away from the towel and there was your face, so thin, taking up the whole monitor. I can see the reflection of R. in your right pupil. Your mom is smiling; you are manufacturing a facsimile of a smile. It passes from a distance as a smile but magnified to the proportions I have, your pain and sadness are clear. Your eyes are bright with recently shed and/or unshed tears, and something else. I am gazing into the eyes of a man who knows the end is not long. And then I am overwhelmed at the familiarity of your gray-blue gaze, so close to me and made life-sized and I find myself gripping the sides of the monitor on either side of your hollowed out face and crying so long and so loudly the dog in the next room starts to howl in his sleep. I tell myself this pain is just an echo, you and your eyes are gone, burned up, energy dispersed to whatever is next. Eventually I stop.

The other picture I look at most often just happened to be at the top of the box I can’t look in yet, a picture I took with my own camera, and someone - maybe me, long ago - protected it in a plastic sleeve so it is still fresh as the day it was developed, all the colors bright. It is your graduation from college. You are surrounded by a sea of people, a little space has opened up around you, plus you are taller than everyone in the vicinity, and also wearing your mortarboard, all of which, combined with you being in the exact center, puts you at the focus of the picture. You are looking directly at me. In all our time together you mentioned only once that you were self-conscious about the discoloration of your teeth from a medication for a childhood illness. It never came up again, but your customary smile - including in the last picture - was always one with lips pressed together. But not in the graduation snapshot - here, you are smiling broadly, teeth flashing. It is a big smile, just for me, for the beginning of your life, our lives. It is proof of your happiness. And even though it all went wrong I would do it all again, I am so proud that you loved me back, and I thank you.