Slide Shows

When my husband passed away last March a flood of such memories threatened to suffocate all that I had come to embrace as reality. The image of our then 5 year old son, sitting on the floor at the memorial watching his father's life flash before his eyes in the form of a slide show has been burned into my memory and my heart breaks every time I allow myself to revisit that place of deep, dark sorrow. "Poor Tommy, he will never understand"... have you ever seen child's heart break? I thought I had until that moment, when everyone else disappeared, and it was just Chuck and Tommy. What will he remember? Who will he know? Will his memories be his own or will they have been rewritten for all of the right (?) reasons. Will he remember asking, many months before, if I "missed daddy" and responding to my "yes" with "Why? Do you miss fighting?" Probably not, but I will. This seemingly "simple" question forced me too see the lasting damage we caused in our quest to be right, or maybe we were just angry that neither of us could remember why we stayed together in the first place. Honestly, I don't know why were so miserable but I do know that we created a slide show of our own, one that had been burned into the memories of our boys. The plan was to make it up to them, to replace the negative experiences with positive. When I was told that Chuck would likely succumb to cancer I promised him, and myself, that I would surround them with  good men, that I would choose wisely and never again subject them to the negativity they once associated with marriage.  We were given the opportunity to reconcile and rectify those events that had threatened to create lasting damage to childhood memories - this was a gift I will be forever grateful for.