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Snap Shots of Eden

Snap Shots of Eden

Recalling family moments is for the nostalgic. Pictures are what push us to go back, way back to a simpler time. Where  our happy moments of innocence are not yet lost. Photos encapsulate an era reserved only for the unsuspecting. Inside pages of a photo album awaits visual reminders and memories folded away somewhere inside time.

With jaded glasses etched and consumed by a lifetime of manic depressive dysfunctions, I visited my family’s youth. Bipolar didn’t exist then. For any of us. My two late brothers as babies, and later as dream-filled young men stood proud, liberated, and untethered by the future that would haunt them.

Photographs are holograms. A person’s soul state emits their light or dark that dwells within. Look close sometime, you’ll see it. Pictures evoke feelings and remembrances. I held three photo albums with an assortment of birthday parties, Christmases, Halloween’s and family dinners. Each in different years. All with happy faces.

I took those three albums back to their rightful owner: my Mother. I think this turned out to be a blessing as my siblings poured over those naive years and soaked up its purity too. One sister kept chanting, “If we had only known then, what we know now…..” But we didn’t. And, that is the beauty of life.

On this day of remembrance, we captured the attention of our elderly Mother now finally recuperated from heart, kidney, and lung conditions. We told her what no Mother should ever have to hear, twice. Her body was frail, but her mind was sharp. On that day I wish it was the other way around. As I looked around a familiar scene, I wondered who had suffered most during these hours. Us siblings had waited, toiled and fretted over the best time to tell Mom. We had carried the burden of our brother’s suicide for almost two months. And, while we had a two month head start to Mom’s first induction just now, we were all crying just as hard.

God, what I would give to go back and live inside those pictures of yesteryear. Where suicide was not even a thought. And bipolar wasn’t even a word. Just one more visit to Eden please.

This Exerp is taken from Patty Ann’s Book: Double Suicide Family.