The last one...

We had done the formal poses.
We were just mucking around with the flowers.
"One last one" the photographer said.
And this is it, the last one.
Taken eighteen years ago, almost half my lifetime.
It made me smile the first moment I saw it.
It still does, but now it is a bittersweet smile.
For it really was the last one.

This is the last photo I have of Dad and I together.
I didn’t know when it was taken that he would be gone so soon.
That he would never see more than our first home.
That he would never see his grandchildren.
That he would never grow old.
So much of our lives were still to come, yet seven short months later he was gone.
The last photo.
It still makes me smile.
It still makes me miss him.

I have tried to scrap this photo all morning.

Tried and failed. I have added and removed papers and elements so many times I have lost count. And still it sits on my screen, unable to match the vision in my head.

He has been gone for eighteen years, and yet sometimes when I least expect it the unfairness of it all still makes me want to cry.

I want to tell the story of this photo. It just won't be told today.