Life Review
My heart is fainter than I thought
That is me, circa 1977, when I was fifteen going on sixteen. That was me not knowing that within a year, my entire life would be upended. By that time, I had been taking care of my mother’s kids for around five years while my dad worked. Dad had just gotten hired by the coal company to work as a security guard, so he worked at night and slept in the day. Mom was sometimes up and around, but was mostly healing from surgery, getting ready to go in for surgery, or in the hospital undergoing surgery.
At that time, Dad would have been 42 and Mom was about to turn 35. For perspective, my daughter, Delena, just turned 31 last November. It is inconceivable for me that they were that young when things shifted as they did. For as long as I had been alive, we had lived in incredible poverty and Dad’s new job paid very well.
Just when I am sure they felt like things were finally turning around for them, they learned that their 15-year-old daughter was going to have a baby. Within a year and a half, I had a son, was married, and had moved to Guam (in that order). In the above photo, I had no clue where Guam was or likely that it even existed.
As mom would have said both when she was about to turn 35 and when she died at age 60, “I told you that so I could tell you this...”
Back here in 2024, I just spent a week of very long hours (my nagging computer furrowed its frowny brow and informed me that my “screen time increased to 11.5 hours per day this week”) scanning, repairing, and basically remastering our vast collection of photographs (the literal paper kind). With the advanced tools Photoshop now has, plus skills I learned my my college-level photo editing and digital design classes many years ago, I was able to vastly improve their appearance.
In all, I retooled 855 photos spanning 1978-1997. I will take a breather and then eventually work on all the photos from 1997-2024. That last task makes me breathe a little harder just thinking about it because not too far into that span, our photos went digital and wow, there are a lot more of them than when we paid Fotomat to process our film.
Not only that, but they are spread apart in probably 40-50 camera dump folders, hidden among endless photos of my food and candles and limpia eggs and houses I looked at but did not buy for whatever reason. That job will be a massive undertaking, but of course, a labor of love. Even so, I am putting off that particular labor of love for a bit until I recover from this most recent labor of love. There is been lots of loving labor going on lately.
At first, I thought I was just performing what I viewed as a necessary task. As Mom, I am the keeper of most of the photos and I managed to save the majority of them from the fire. It occurred to me that only I know where to find these treasures and who the various people are, so I wanted to organize all that information while I can still remember most of it.
Despite that reasonable, Virgoean motivation, once I got into the task and saw the remarkable impact Photoshop now has, it was like the people and the moment the camera captured in time came to life right before my eyes. Suddenly, I was looking at and truly seeing my sweet babies to the point that I could almost smell their skin and feel their warmth against me.
Because I was not a very good mother a lot of the time, it has always been hard for me to look at my kids in photo form from that time, especially my little boys (the first three). I had them at 16, 18, and 20 and by then, I already had critically deep wounds and no clue at all how to heal them or even start addressing them. I was a walking mass of pain and confusion and fear and yes, anger. Neither me nor my husband at that time had any business raising children.
I detached because I did not know how to deal with those heavy feelings and I certainly did not know how to mother in those horrible 1980s when loving and compassionate parenting was not the norm. But dear Goddess, I loved them so much (and still do) despite phoning in life for their formative years.
Going through these photos and touching up water damage, scratches, bad lighting, and a huge pile of other artifacts and blemishes was healing, almost like I could clean up the ugly feelings and memories. I worked three jobs and didn’t have time to clean my house? Bam! Photoshop erases the socks on the floor and the pile of newspapers and magazines on the couch. I had pimples? Thank you, Healing Tool! My skin is flawless. Carpet has stains? That’s where you’re wrong, unsuspecting onlooker! Captain Remove Tool says otherwise.
Going through those photos was a museum-level testimony to the evolution of photography. I have photos from a 35mm camera, a Kodak Disk 4000, a wide variety of 110 cameras, and at least two different polaroid cameras.
I will guarantee this Christmas card was printed on a dot matrix printer (1995).
…aided by Photoshop.
I cleaned and colored and straightened and cropped and softened and healed all 855 images and finished around 4:00 am this morning.
As I got closer to the end of the chronological trail, so to speak, my discomfort quickly grew. The feeling shifted from a healthy healing of the past to the sense that I was sliding down a greased hill into disaster. At the bottom of that hill, of course, was the smoking wreckage of seventeen years of marriage, the destruction of a family, and the evaporation of every hope and dream I’d ever had up to that point.
It ended in a brutally ugly way that I did not see coming. I cannot truly say if that experience or the house burning in 2021 was the most painful loss I’ve ever endured. I guess it depends on the day. In each situation, I ultimately ended up in a markedly better place, but it took a while. At the time, the pain was crippling and soul-breaking and in each case, I could not imagine how my life would go on.
But it did… in both cases. In all three cases if you count 1977. The sun came up. The hours passed. The world turned. The sun went down. Endless hours turned into days which turned into weeks, which turned into months, which turned into years and we call that a life.
All three times, back in 1977, again in 1996, and then in 2021… those times when everything in my world flipped… I never saw it coming. All three times, what happened leveled me and I could not imagine building a life from the pieces of rubble I held in my hands. After each of those three times, the trust I had in my own judgment faltered. “Faltered” is a lame word for what happened. It’s more like the trust slipped through my fingers like disappearing sand.
As I looked at the photos of me in 1996, so completely oblivious to the fact that my life was on the brink of total breakdown, my unease grew and I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming and the physical responses that felt almost like a panic attack. I wanted to scream at that version of me and warn her. I wanted to assure her that it would be hard but eventually everything would work out. All I could do was watch the photos unfold, flipping forward like an analog clock toward that inevitable conclusion.
By the time I got to that last photo just before 4:00 am, I had run through a gamut of emotions and while I thought there would be another side to all of it and I would come out somehow different, I just felt sad. I felt compassion for the woman who went through all of that. There was no further healing or resolution of that specific trauma. Instead, there was the futile voyeurism of a tragic loss everyone concerned suffered. None of us came through that experience unscathed and I had to confront the knowledge that no amount of advanced Photoshop tools and training will ever make that any better.
Or maybe it was the bad hair styles, tragic fashion choices, and the effects of decades of eating to medicate pain that depressed me.
I am OK now, but admittedly, it was a hell of a week and I am even more grateful for where I am now.
