Surround Yourself With Love

Literally.

Yesterday was spent attempting to finish up photo books for the kids about their daddy.  I have pictures spanning his lifetime and captions about the events and places.  I want something physical to be left should I not be there to tell them. They are simply snippets and perhaps for me it's for my peace of mind but I wanted each to have their own copy to look at, remember and refer to.  It's a project I started a week after Chris died and have tried to tackle several times without success.  The task was too heavy, the pictures in mass a painful hole in my heart.

Alone in the house yesterday I was going to get a hold on the cleaning and instead thought, today is it.  I'm doing it.  Ha!  Only ha because it took 90 minutes to comb through a box to find a specific picture only to discover it wasn't there.  Despite this set back I finished finding pictures, uploaded them and worked furiously on the book.  It's still not complete, but I'm working!!

At one point I had to stop to get Maya from preschool.  On the way home we chatted about school and I told her about the book I was making.  On the way in I grabbed  two giant stacks of pictures which we had set aside for the slide show at Chris' memorial and Maya asked to see them.  She sat on the living room floor and took out the first stack while I ran upstairs. 

Walking back into the living room, my breath caught and my eyes filled with salty tears as I reminded myself to breathe.

There she was, diligently going about her labor of love.  My gut response was to put them away, but really, this is her love, her journey and though painful for me, it was so sweet and so innocent.    

Maya went through pictures and talked about ones she remembered, asked about others she did not all the while surrounding herself with the memories of a world that seems so far removed.

At one point I asked if she would like to make any drawings to include in our book project of memories she had.  She sadly put her chin down and said "I don't remember much."  I've never heard her say this and sadly, I know it's true.  I do know, however, that once we start talking, memories return about events and places we have been and relief sets in.

Maya spent the next 3 hours drawing pictures then continued for another after dinner and returned to it again this morning.  They started with just her and daddy, went on to a camping trip we took the summer before he died and then they evolved to this alternate world where Riley knows daddy or Pickachu goes shopping with daddy. 

There it is, this other universe in which Chris exists and in which memories are blurred with reality.  {sigh}