damn snapfish

Every November since 2005, I make one of those cheesy Snapfish family calendars. It takes a few weeks to find the best pictures from both sides of the family over the past year, double check all the birthdays, holidays, and yahrzeits, and get all the pictures uploaded and arranged in a reasonably coherent and attractive way. Then, relieved, we can get it printed and sent out as an end of the year gift to family members. Its usually a fairly pleasant and sort of meditative process, as long as I dont start last minute and have a full on freak out. WHY do they ALL need their birthdays remembered EVERY single year??

The last bunch of years, my eldest has helped with the project, logging into our account and doing lots of photo editing and arranging. To be fair, she did the bulk of the work the last two years. So this year, with her living on the other side of the planet, I wasn’t sure how it would go. To her immense credit, she logged in whenever she had a few free minutes, and did a lot of work. It was kind of sweet and touching and insistent, reminding me that despite her very palpable absence in our house, she is still so very, very, here. My 10 year old got in on the act too, having some photo editing fun, and causing her sister to re-assert exactly what the hierarchy was here - there was to be NO messing with her work by a younger sib.

So, all was cruising along in a lovely sort of mother-daughters long distance ball of energy and flow, until I got to the part I hate most in the making of the calendar every year, the yahrzeit dates. For the vast majority of family members, I add the same dates year to year, often using the same photo taken of them in various stages of old age. It makes me sad every time, but I accept that this is a positive way to remember them, and so we do it.

But a year and a half ago, I lost one of my oldest childhood friends to suicide. Last fall, I added her picture, numbly, even though she is not in the family; it felt right to do. This year, I found myself adding her picture AGAIN. I had to use the same picture I used last year, because unlike every other category of picture, there would be no more updated versions.

Its a picture of us sitting on the couch together, with my two eldest daughters, one a seven year old, and one a baby. We are leaning towards each other, and laughing at something, and I cannot make myself remember what was funny, except that she was always laughing, a full-throated, booming, life-affirming contagious laugh.

It made me suddenly absolutely furious at her, to have to use this happy picture, again and again and again, for the rest of my life. How did it happen that I was collaborating with those two tiny girls in the picture, creating this massive monument to memory and years gone by, and needing to put her glowing, laughing face into the yahrzeit slot: 29 Tammuz, over and over and over again. I am just raging at the unfairness and impossibility of what she did. My brain still reels, 18 months later: how can it be that there will never be a new photo again?