The Photographs

We had been talking about getting a fancy digital camera.

In 2003, there weren’t a million choices like there are now, and the choices that were out there were either expensive or Capital E Expensive. We’d done our homework and knew which one we were going to get.

But we had time.

After all, the baby wasn’t due until June.

Until it was time.

As I moaned and groaned in the L&D room, my husband gave his work-wife instructions on EXACTLY which camera it was. The lens size. The case he wanted. The extra memory card he would need so he could fill it with memories of this day. And to hurry. Instructions to take his credit card and hurry.

She came back with our camera.

Lucky for the camera, labor took for-freaking-ever so the battery had time to charge and Jason had time to read the instructions.

A couple hundred pictures were taken with that camera over the next few days and weeks. We had enough memory in the card and computer to hold many more days and weeks and months and years of memories.

Little did we know…

Yesterday morning I woke up to a notification that a photo had been shared on my wall. I figured it was a meme of some sort that I was tagged in so I could share with my favorite people so I wouldn’t have bad luck.

But no. It was a photo. A real photo. Of Charlie.

Well, I take that back. You couldn’t really see him because he was in a front carrier and it was from a distance. But it was a photo of him. And us. The three of us. A family. Because something that’s even more rare than photos of him are photos of all three of us together (there are now two).

My friend’s mother in law had snapped the photo at Relay for Life and it’s spent the last 11 years in an album in her home. Now it’s headed my way and will be added to the handful of tangible memories we have.

And now I have to wonder if there are more pictures out there… maybe there are. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to see them one day.

Until then, when the photos in my head start getting blurry, I have one extra one to pull out to remind me that he was once here with us.