Your parents break up when you are eight years old and for a long time you are angry and disappointed and sorry for all the impossible might have beens. Then you get older and grow up and start to see them as people not "parents" and you start to understand why things happened the way they did and how sometimes you just can't stop those things from happening. And then you blink and you are thirty and all the wishing in the world won't stop your father from dying and you think this emptiness in your heart can not possibly be there forever and then he is ten years gone and you still feel the weight of his hand in yours just like when you were a little girl.
And still you miss him.
Then a box of pictures arrives from your aunts - pictures from your grandparents' photo albums, pictures now sent out into the world as your grandfather also is gone. And you see yourself when you were small and you see your parents and your brother and now the only story you want to tell anyone any more is that you were born loving these three people more than anyone, more than anything, more than everything. The only reason you know what family means is because of them.
I could tell you my childhood wasn't perfect and that would be true. But when I look at this picture all I know is that in every way that mattered, it was. I have always been, and still remain, the lucky daughter of wonderful parents and the little sister of the best brother in the world. And that is by far the better truth.
Merry Christmas from the Mondor family, December 1972.
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December 22
2009
09:40 PM
Lovely.
(I know I had some kleenex around here somewhere...)