Memories

I am strange when it comes to marking memories with material objects. When my parents got rid of the ugly 70's couch in our living room I insisted on cutting a piece of the fabric and placing it in my baby book because it was the couch of my childhood. When the city cut down the tree in front of our house because the roots were tearing up the sidewalk, I sawed off a branch and insisted on keeping it in my closet. I have saved some of the most ridiculous things over the years, because of my need to capture the past in tangible form. Some might say I have always been a historian.

The farther I get from the actual experience of holding Leah, of loving Leah, of losing Leah, the more I need reminders that it was real. She happened. I know she happened. But I want proof. I developed a voracious need for documentation. Yet even though I longed to curate Leah's life, I also felt like I couldn't because I knew that the act of organization would reveal how little I have to remember her by.

Thus, I have a long to-do list that I do not have the energy for. I really want to finish Leah's scrapbook, but I truly despise scrapbooking. Jeff will end up doing it, under my artistic direction, but he has very little time at home and rarely feels like scrapbooking. I have a quilt I want to hang, a frame I need to choose a picture for, a bunch of blog posts specifically aimed at helping other parents that I need to write, cards to sort and organize, and some things to print for the scrapbook. Generally I am a motivated person who thrives on deadlines and to-do lists and suffers without them (i.e. my no deadline, never ending dissertation), but this list has been difficult to tackle. I recently did scratch off one item: picking out pictures for my regular photo album.

We had many pictures from Leah's birth, funeral service, and wake that we had not printed. We didn't print many of the birth pictures because I looked tired and gross, and Leah's color looks bad in the pictures. It seemed unnecessary to print some of the pictures from her funeral since they are mostly of the backs of people's heads. At the time that we first got them we just did not want many of them. Yet after months of looking at the same pictures over and over again, you start to want something new, something more. Finally printing out those pictures gave me what I crave, although I have put off placing them in the album to drag out the experience a little. I know that when I'm done, I'm done. There are no more pictures. There will be no new memories. That hurts.