Unexpected Thanks

            The cardboard smelled old.  Lonnie gently released a tucked flap of the corrugated box top and opened the carton.  The contents of her mother’s life, all ninety years of it, were revealed to her in one musty whiff.  Gingerly, she lifted the vintage sepia-toned photos into the surrounding twenty-first century air, some, like her mother’s baby pictures, spanning almost a century.  She considered each scene as she placed the photos in organized piles on the kitchen counter.

            As the remaining daughter, the task fell to her alone.  She had seen these pictures before, over the years as a child, and she always imagined what life was like in these captured eras:  The Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the storybook fifties.  They were all represented in the mounds of snapshots and formal matte photos:  Mommy, the glamour girl, the gangly teenager, the young mother and the cool sixties mom in the op art dress.  Lonnie’s job was clear and tearful: she was choosing photos to epitomize her mother’s life for the viewing.  Mom would have been ninety-one on November 23; her birthday often landed on Thanksgiving Day.

            Lonnie wanted to scoff at the very thought of giving thanks after such a year.  Her only sibling, her sister and best friend, died in April after a long and valiant battle with cancer.  Her thirteen-year old good and faithful dog died last August and now, this November, her mother has gone away, too.  A year of multiple losses, it felt like a triple punch to the gut with barely enough time to recover between each crippling blow.  And now here she was, looking at forever preserved images of living happy people who smiled for the camera, now dead people, like her father and her grandparents, fondly remembered aunts and uncles and her beloved sister.

            Why wasn’t she in bed right now with the covers pulled tightly over her head, shutting out the world and its random twists of unkind fate?  Would anyone really miss it if posed moments of her mother’s life were not displayed in gilded frames and arranged by a funeral director on a polished mahogany table?

            Lonnie closed her eyes and squeezed the tears onto her cheeks.  They were quiet tears, tears of relief.  In that moment she knew that she would do what she was supposed to do.  She always did what she was supposed to do.  She was the good, dutiful daughter, often to her own disgust.  But, she knew that she owed her mother due respect in honoring her long life with the expected reflection of photographs.  Feeling abandoned no longer, she inhaled strength from these faded paper images of lives gone by.  She even allowed herself a few smiles at the memories.
            Now, she was grateful that she had these precious people in her life for as long as God wanted to lend them to her.  And she realized that she was blessed to have even more, the people here with her now, family and friends, to accompany her on the remainder of this earthly journey.