Day 5 of 31 Days of My Single Life

my grandma and grandpa

I spent the evening on Shutterfly.

My grandma's memorial is on the 15th, and I want to make a memory book of photos with spaces for guests to comment next to photos.

I've never made a photo album online before. I really wanted to just do it by hand, manually, use adhesive and stick to paper, but I don't trust those kind of albums not to start yellowing fairly quickly.

It's overwhelming when you want to accurately represent 89 years of life into 20 pages gleaned from digital photos scattered across computers, iPads, and external hard drives, and hundreds of hard copies residing in layers reminiscent of the Grand Canyon stuffed into a Rubbermaid I retrieved out of my grandma's closet.
I can't. I don't have the time or knowledge to take 89 years of life and showcase all her friends, her trips, her youth, her later years, her brothers and sisters, all of it. It's overwhelming.
Before I left school today I put marker to whiteboard and figured out the layout of the 20 pages granted me. Tonight I started plugging in photos, trying to find ones relevant to the categories I had decided on.

A life complete. Ended. What is not condensed now into an album, memories written down, moments shared in some kind of concrete way, will be lost in another generation or two.
And so I scurry to freeze this life in some kind of time capsule for the great-great grandson who was born exactly a week before she died. For his children, for my children, for my children's children. Who was this woman?

Our lives are fleeting, and when we die, our life lingers for awhile in oral reminisces and photographic snapshots, and then, like smoke, the wind whispers, and we are a thing of the past, one layer of the foundation upon which the next generations stand.

I was talking to a co-worker yesterday. Her grandpa died before she was born. But she can see his impact upon her dad, and, by influence, on her. She is who she is because of who her grandpa was.

The memory of us may one day be forgotten. But the reason why history is important--what I am trying to teach my 6th graders who are tempted to view history as a meaningless study of dead people--is that we would not be who we are without those who have gone before.



My grandma,
great-uncle, and great-aunt