I'm sitting here listening to The Fountain sound track. I have always loved the last track on the album; "Together We Will Live Forever". I suppose now it has more meaning.
I thought I had prepared myself for this, but I really hadn't. I'm not being a hermit, and I don't cry myself to sleep. Most of my tears came before he passed away. I knew what was coming, and the thought of it was, at times, too much to bare without a reaction. But now he is gone, and everything I do from the moment I wake up seems to be subtly effected. It's like the cartoons... the rain cloud following me around over my noggin.
The last conversation Grandpa and I had before his last stroke was about a car. I ended up buying the car once I realized it was our last discussion. I wanted him to be tied to it forever, I wanted to follow through with something, and I also wanted a distraction... something to look forward too each day. Little did I know, this cloud would hang low, low enough to fog my view of everything. The only true distraction is photography. It's the only thing I can do right now that actually seems unaffected, or if anything, positively affected.
I took a lot of pictures on the night Grandpa died and on the nights leading up to it. It was such a relief to know how understanding my family is of how important it was for me to take those pictures. I asked Grandpa years ago if it would be alright to photograph him after he?s died, he laughed and said sure... then he yelled at Grandma who was in the bathroom at the time...
"Hey Grandma, did you hear what Robby wants to do?"
"No! what did he say?"
"He wants to photograph our dead bodies after we've died!"
"Oh that would be a fine idea!"
It sure didn't seem so light hearted once I was actually doing it!
Anyways... I put these pictures off for a few days. I've been feeling so strange about the whole thing that I just couldn't quite stomach it right away. I have Grandpa's watch on the wall behind me. I stopped it at the time he died. Well, technically I stopped it about 10 minutes later and then turned the hands back.
I have a car, a watch, and a whole lot of pictures... but it's the memories that I'll only ever recall to myself which I am most thankful for. If he could hear me then maybe he can still hear me now...
I hope one day I'll be able to crawl onto a cloud and lay between him and Grandma again... maybe Unsolved Mysteries will be on... and when we finally turn off the TV and the room goes dark, I can fall asleep once again sharing his pillow, and listening to the radio coming through the tiny speaker slipped beneath it... |
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