Not really a Kodak Moment

It just struck me today that we have absolutely no pictures of this entire process. The last picture we took was, of course, of Jasper playing on his Razor scooter some time in early February. The camera has been collecting dust since then.

Part of this makes sense. We usually take pictures of happy events, and moments that we want to remember. The pictures seem to serve not only as physical records, but as stakes for our memories to grasp on to. I am much more likely to remember sitting around the kitchen table playing poker with my sisters, brother-in-law and Terry on our beach vacation last year because I’ll see the pictures we took in my iPhoto library several times over the course of the next few years. The photo serves as a positive reinforcement for that memory.

It works the other way around as well. I have one picture of my father only about a month or two before he passed that stands out. Sure, it was on a good day, but he certainly doesn’t look like the Dad in my memory. That picture was taken optimistically, but every time I glance by it, it brings a rush of memories that I wouldn’t mind letting fade a bit more. I always think to myself that I should delete it, but I never do.

It struck me today, as I am just days away from the four week mark after surgery, that we don’t have pictures of any of the things that have been the most prominent part of my life so far in 2007. There is no picture of me lying in a hospital bed with a huge wad of gauze taped across my comically enormous nose. There is no shot of me with my arm around my surgeon. No record of Jasper’s art taped proudly up on my hospital room wall. No picture of my camp out in the La-Z-Boy with my laptop and my stack of unwatched movies. The flowers all died and the food was all eaten without any image record of the wonderful gifts from our friends. And we never got a photo of me trying to juggle those bottles of barium.

Why not? I can only come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a conscious decision. We just simply don’t take the camera out when we’re in the middle of something scary. And both in my eyes and Terry’s eyes, this has certainly qualified as “something scary.” With the possible exception of the hours just before surgery for me, and the painfully long wait for the surgeon to tell Terry that all was over and well, we’ve been very optimistic that it has been a huge success. Nontheless, I guess that doesn’t qualify enough to push us into saying “Oooh, where’s the camera? This is GREAT!” The outcome has been wonderful, but the memory of the journey is one we’d rather let fade, at least a little.

It seems, then, that this blog is as close to a photo album that I’ll get of the past month. Somehow, I don’t mind the written re-telling of this very different chapter in my life. And maybe it’s because I’ve been chronicling it with humor that I think the pictures would be anywhere near funny. There really is no telling whether that photo of me eating hospital gruel  would bring back memories of the friends who visited and made me smile, or of that half hour when I thought my blood pressure was about to screw me over again and no nurse in the entire complex thought it worth coming into my room personally.

A photo can sneak up on you, and at a glance provide that rush of an emotion. This blog, however, needs to be read deliberately in order to paint the same picture and bring back that same emotional wave. It’s like a photo album with the safety on.

I’d like to think that now that I know the outcome of the surgery, and that even though I’m still recovering I know that I will be fine, that I would enjoy looking back at some actual pictures and using them to pat myself on the back for coming so far. But apparently both my and Terry’s subconscious have approached this with a bit more wisdom, stifling any thought of even the existence of a camera until now. And I’m sure, God forbid we had to do it all over, that the camera would again sit, collecting dust.

Still, though, you really should have seen my nose….