My father passed away in June – this picture to the left is the one we used for his obituary. As we were cleaning out his office, we found two pictures that were taken of him with me when I was three years old. I’d never seen these pictures before, and I held them for several long seconds before putting them in my stack. There’s something in his face as he looks at me that tells me he just adores me, and after losing him this year, and missing him so much, I felt that was a gift that had been sent to comfort me.
My husband asked what I would like for Christmas, and I told him that I would like those old pictures taken down, copied, reprinted, and saved onto a disk for me. I would like them framed. I imagined the whole thing would take a day, cost under twenty dollars, and I’d be perfectly content. My husband took the pictures in to our local photography store, placed the order, and then called back two days later.
They had lost the pictures.
Gasp, choke, unbelief … what? Lost the pictures? I had no negatives. I had no copies … that’s why we’d taken the pictures in, to get copies. If those pictures were lost, there was nothing I could do about it. I was absolutely shattered. Finding those pictures had felt like a message from my father to me, that he was watching over me and wanted me to be comforted. Losing those pictures felt like losing my father again.
My husband, bless his heart, stepped up to the plate for me. He never once said, “Oh, they’re just pictures.” He never belittled my feelings. He held me in his arms while I cried my eyes out, not just because of the pictures, but because of the emotions of loss that were resurfacing. I know my father is waiting for me on the other side—I have a very strong belief in the afterlife—but I still miss him so very much, and my husband understands that. He let me have my cry-out, and then he kept on that store until at last, they found the pictures, which they gave him free, and the frames, free. Um, yeah … they weren’t getting a single penny out of us after keeping us in limbo for two days.
I have my pictures now, beautifully framed, and I want to thank my husband for respecting my feelings and loving me unconditionally. And I would upload those pictures so you can see them, but the photo store sort of forgot to put them on a disk for me. That’s perfectly fine … I’m going to hand-walk them into another store and do it myself, and keep them in my own tight little grubby paws until they’re safely copied.
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