Wednesday, September 7, 2016

healing takes a lot of time

i've been working on a project where i am archiving all of my family's photos. it's been intense - a journey through their lives from the 1890s up until now. i just got through the end of the 70's, and it took me 7 months to work up the nerve to really start scanning the year of my parent's marriage. seeing photos of them together is still weird and it leaves me wondering more and more about what my mother was like back then. it's so much easier to imagine my father in his late 20's. my mother is such a more difficult puzzle to put together.

she was so beautiful, and young, and fresh. these photos don't remind me at all of the woman i knew as a child or as an adult now. it's so obvious that my father loved her to distraction. how hard it must have been for him too...

mental illness is such a beast. it steals the ones you love so completely if they go untreated. i would have loved to know this woman in the photos - i bet she was amazing.

but that's the thing about photos right? they only capture the good and the great moments. they rarely catch the beast within, or the fights i knew my parents had. photos can lie.

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