Wednesday, November 4, 2009

700 Sundays

The actor Billy Crystal had a one-man show of this title (now also a book) - it alludes to his father's sudden death when Billy was 15. His father always made a point of reserving Sunday to spend with his children, and 15 years of Sundays came out to be about 700 Sundays.

Reflecting on my 15 (almost 16) years of marriage to Jen, it seems more vast when expressed in days or weeks. From the day we were married to the day Jen died, including both days, was 5800 days in total. I can't say we were together every day, because of a few weeks of travel for work in most years, but it sounds longer when I say it like that. Even converted to weeks, it works out to 829 Sundays. Sunday was a day we would normally be at church together, although Jen's chronic illnesses deprived her of a few opportunities there.

I have a reasonably good memory, and of course it's supplemented now by photographs, videos and a diary (just the past year), so I can still appreciate the scope of the time together, the amount that we went through, the depth that we reached in our relationship. My sadness remains for the boys, for even in their 13 and 8 years respectively, the first three or four years give few memories. Secundus has only a window of two or three years of really immediate memories of Jen. On the suggestion of our minister, Secundus has started writing down snippets that he remembers of Jen, and I'm hoping that it will help him over time to retain some of that immediacy, on top of videos etc. Even for myself, though now those 829 weeks seem close at hand, I imagine that time will keep wearing away the details. I have an ambition - perhaps too grand - to write a narrative of our time together, woven around the photographs, so the boys have a framework for that past, rather than merely disconnected anecdotes.

1 comment:

  1. It doesn't sound too grand an ambition at all - it sounds wonderful and you've already shown that you can do it so well - you've started already, with this blog, discussing photos, telling stories. I wouldn't try to start with a grand narrative. I'd keep doing what you're doing - taking a photo and telling the story, with a few pointers as to how the story fits in (in terms of themes, place and time and the flow of events) to the bigger picture. If you keep doing this, you'll eventually have a stack of stories that will be easy to weave together (you'll find the stories weave together naturaly) than if you tried to write the whole thing "from the beginning". It will also be more alive, and best of all, the eventual narrative will vibrantly convey the REAL story - the emotional core of your relationships, the love of every family member for the other, and the joy of life together.

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