Pictures of You

I sometimes think of these lyrics from The Cure:

I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
that I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
that I almost believe that the pictures
are all I can feel 

Curiously enough, I don't find photographs of Jen that emotionally charged at present. But I've finally begun my long project of organising our photographs into some more coherent order. There were a few proper albums, but there were many photographs still in packets. The challenge is to work out what they all are (places and dates), and to that end I've gone back to find all the negatives (for pre-digital, which for us is pre 2007), since these at least preserve the sequence of the photos.

Alongside this I've also started dipping into the diaries that we do have in order to put together a time frame of key dates in each year of our life together. My eventual aim is to write down memories of our life together, interspersed with photos, so that the boys have something more tangible that disconnected anecdotes of their mother, blurred by increasing time.

Unfortunately until 2009 I never kept a diary of daily events, although I have saved all of my 'appointment' diaries - i.e. the ones in which I keep track of upcoming events. These are often quite useful in tracking holidays that we took, or special events. But there are important gaps for unplanned events. At the moment I still can't pin down the day on which Jen and I decided to get married - sometime in November 1992 - since it didn't rate a diary entry in advance! I remember many details of the evening - which ended up on a walk around an oval in Hackett late at night - none of the romantic candlelit dinner or mystery trips to propose.

Jen's diaries are another challenge. In my brief experience she holds the record for the number of elegant notebooks and diaries begun and not finished, so I have a drawer of them to go through.  I'm not always sure how far the  privacy of a dead person should have priority. She had a prayer diary, for instance, in which she wrote out prayers to God - is it OK to read this just to understand what she was thinking about?

There's one diary that covers the beginning of 1992, when Jen and I started talking a bit together, before our relationship really started in June of that year. It's strange to read how Jen felt about me back then. But I haven't found anything yet of Jen's that deals with late 1992. My next project is to try to recover my email from 1992 - I do have it, but on floppies and for a Mac (I have one of those too) - since in those far off days I tended to write emails more like letters, longer and full of information.

The most poignant recent entry in her intermittent diaries is from September 15th, 2008, the day of first diagnosis, as she was sitting in the waiting room before seeing the breast surgeon for the first time. She describes the mad rush of the morning - she wasn't scheduled to see him for two weeks, but a cancellation gave her a timeslot at very short notice. She had the results from the mammogram. She writes:

I've read the results - some worrying calcification, severe fibrocystic diseases. Investigation warranted.

I'm here now waiting the The Valley Private. Looking forward to being told there's nothing to worry about but scared that this will go on for a while yet.

That is the anguish of diaries - the moment of hope before the axe falls, before the future just crumbles away into dust and ashes.