I time-traveled for several hours today. I swirled through years of memories of my family’s life, picking and clicking and dragging to get the slideshow photos ready for my mother’s memorial service next week. This overwhelmed me emotionally. I mostly cried about photos of Daddy even though he has been gone almost five years. That hole is still too big.

This is my third time being in charge of this part of a memorial. The clicking and dragging gets easier, but the picking throws me into a serious funk.
Losing someone I love is like losing a body part for me. My world must be rebalanced and recalibrated. Nothing highlights this loss of the missing piece like a slideshow of hundreds of photos of the dearly departed.

For all the folks attending a service, this is an important part of remembering the loved one. It is worth the trouble. I chose photos that had others we love with mama…Great times with family and friends.

I could have gone through more files, but stopped past the time I should have quit. My eyes could no longer focus. I could not think. I think my brain got confused about the present while traveling through all that frozen time. I had to click on now and drag my head to bed to reset myself.

I will pass this on to my sister to add to and tweak. I did go back through and remove some photos my mother would not have approved of. She is known for cutting herself out of photos using scissors. There were some times she did not want herself to be frozen in. We laugh when we find these clipped pictures.

Everything will be ready for the service… flowers, food,  photos and music. We have helpers.

We will hold on to mama that one more afternoon. Then we must start letting her go from our presence. We cannot freeze. We must keep living.

FLOW