I feel a need to apologize...

...Not to you readers here…but to the 330-odd "friends" I have on Facebook.

I posted a ton of pictures today…probably a good half of them ones of Charley, our life together--or of his funeral.

Rather loaded pictures for the usual Facebook mentality, seeing as he's dead, after all…particularly when I'm uploading them to an album titled, "My Former Life."

I created this album well over two and a half years ago, when I first got on Facebook and started filling in my profile. Back then I uploaded a relatively small number of carefully selected photos of Charley and me: one or two of us in high school, when we got back together as adults, our courtship before we got married, of us with Anna…and a few from his funeral, burial, or the dedication held at PIR the week after he died.

Yet today I added about 40 new photos. And I felt a little self-conscious--and slightly pathetic embarrassed, somehow, I suppose--that I was posting so many photos when he's been dead for over 5 1/2 years.

I know why I was adding so many photos. My newly widowed friend's sister-in-law is gathering photos of Greg for his memorial service next week, and I knew I had at least one or two good ones of them together in college. So I pulled out my photo albums and boxes of loose photos from college, and hit my scanner. I found the photos of my friend and her late husband and emailed the scanned copies to the sister-in-law, but I also had a lot of fun seeing all the other photos from college and reminiscing about all the fun times I had. So in addition to the photos of my friend and her husband, I scanned a bunch that I wanted to share with friends on Facebook…but I also came across a few other, more loaded pictures:

Photos of Charley and I in his sister's wedding, in the summer before our own wedding in 2003:


A photo of us at my sister's wedding, in the summer of 1996 when I was 18 and we'd been dating for over two years:


A long forgotten photo of Charley and me in college, from my nineteenth birthday:

There aren't many photos of Charley and me in college--they fell victim to the symbolic New Year's Eve pyre I had shortly after we broke up in our junior year, and later I neatly excised him from any photo albums I had throughout college--so it was a bit jarring to find one of us that I didn't remember. It was a loose photo, cut smaller to fit into a picture frame years ago and then tossed in an envelope with other usurped and displaced former-frame-worthy photos. I hadn't seen it six years ago when I raided old photo albums for pictures to take to our ten-year high school reunion or, days later, when I rounded up photos to place on the memory boards at Charley's funeral.

Seeing the "new" old photos of Charley wasn't necessarily upsetting…but it was profoundly striking when I uploaded the photos from college to Facebook and placed them in chronological order…and then found myself going from the one photo of Charley and me at my nineteenth birthday, to the next photo, of my newly widowed friend with her now-late husband. We were all nineteen, all so fresh-faced and young, and had been dating for two or three years at that point…and now we're both widows by age 33. That's what got me.

And coming across forgotten photos of my dead friend amongst the mix was jarring too. Regardless of how complicated our friendship became just before Charley died and in the years after it, and regardless of how much her mental illness and my newly widowed grief complicated the strain, it brings up a mix of emotions to see old photos of her. Photos from a cruise we took together when I was 24--a very happy, wonderful set of memories with her…




…Ones when our mutual friend was pregnant with her first child--before that friend faced her own unexpected loss and life changes, although they didn't involve death. Ones of the three of us--and Charley--from my sister's wedding many years before.

And while so many of the photos from college--of me laughing and having a great time with friends--are fantastically fun to look at, and remember, and share on Facebook with those same friends, my head and my heart were also subconsciously keeping their own tally of the changes in the last fifteen years since the photos started.

...Dead….widowed…mental illness…infidelity…really bad eyebrows. (Okay, not all of my thoughts were emotional and loaded.)

For the most part these days, at over 5 1/2 years of widowhood, the facts of my life don't really elicit an emotional response inside me. I'm too used to them, have reacted to and grieved for them so many times over the last five years that I'm generally not triggered by too much in my normal day-to-day life.

But this week isn't exactly a normal week for me. My friend's recent widowhood brings up a lot of things for me, whether consciously or not…and so I scanned and uploaded photos to Facebook for a number of reasons today. To find the photos for my friend…to archive digital copies of photos from college, just for fun and the pure hell of it…to procrastinate on getting started on my stupid income taxes…to share fun memories with my college friends….

And eventually, I transitioned past the happy and innocent photos and started uploading photos of Charley…because it was so jarring to see my happy, smiling photos in college; to know that Charley was such a relatively small part of my best, happy years in college…and to have it mirrored back to me, once again, just how much life has changed since those photos were taken eleven, thirteen, and fifteen years ago.

Because while it started out innocently enough, the afternoon's photo foray reminded me again that this loss, that Charley's death, really did happen. It really was real, no matter how "normal" life seems these days. And while photos of us, of us with Anna, make me happy, I find I still need acknowledgment from time to time that tragedy struck my life.

I didn't get our friends to write down their favorite memories of Charley, of how his death--or how watching Anna and me face life without him these past five years--has changed them. I don't really have a record of the impact he had on their lives, of how much his friendship meant to them. It warms my heart so much to see the loving, touching things that my friend's friends have written on Facebook to her and Greg. But her loss triggers my own loss too, whether I like or not. And whether or not this week is worse than other 'bad' weeks I've had (because it's not), I need to remember that I'm still more preoccupied and wobblier more prone to grief than I am most weeks.

And it also means I'll upload photos to Facebook that I wouldn't in a "normal" week.

And even though I've gotten comments from several friends--both widows and nonwidows alike--thanking me for sharing the photos and the fun memories of Charley, I still feel I ought to offer an apology to the 300 or so people who won't ever comment on the photos: the ones who might feel uncomfortable seeing photos of my dead spouse or wonder why I'm bringing all that shit up for the five thousandth time, five years later. And so to them, I feel compelled to explain:

So sorry to flood your news feed with five zillion photos today. I was being lazy on a sunny Sunday, and procrastinating…and I love old photos, and history, and remembering fun times, and I got a little carried away.

But I also posted so damned many photos because this week, I'm reminded that death strikes people way too young, even in this day and age. And I'm extra sad this week that a friend of mine will now be facing grief, and early death, every day…

...and I posted all those photos because I still remember the people who are no longer with us…

…and because I want to remember the happy times in my life, too, regardless of how long ago they were...

…and because I still need my former life, and Charley's life, to matter to someone--because our life still matters to me. Very much.

…And like it or not, grief can continue to inhibit your life years after your loss, even if many people don't want to hear that fact.

So I just wanted to say: there was a reason--a lot of very good reasons--why I posted so many photos today. So sorry if it offended you*.

[ * …Except I'm not really sorry at all.]

But Facebook's character limit for status updates would cut me off prematurely…and besides, I don't really care what "those" people think. They can hide or unfriend me if my photos of my dead husband bother them.

And who knows--maybe nobody is bothered at all by them (but I'd still bet a solid $10 that I made at least one person uncomfortable). But in our culture, death and grief are still so taboo--particularly years after the fact--that I still feel compelled to apologize…

…and so I offer up the apology here, I guess. O Universe: mea culpa.

Even when it's not necessary at all….

---

And on a separate but related note, jarring was the word that kept coming back to me, over and over, as I wrote this post and as I looked at and absorbed all the photos I posted this afternoon…how jarring it was to see the juxtaposition between normal, happy-go-lucky, innocent college life and what I now know will happen in the next five to twelve years after college.

How jarring it was to see now-dead people smiling out of photographs…still healthy, still happy, still alive…and with no inkling of what would lie in store for them.

The same goes for me too, seeing myself across the years. Happy, smiling, oblivious, clueless…and yet also speaking at my husband's funeral; getting pictures taken with our infant daughter at his funeral, his burial; signing the pole he crashed into…and then Anna and I smiling together five years later.

How are all these people still me??


If you have another word for it besides jarring, I'd like to know….