Bemusement

What photos do I keep?

What photos do I throw away?

I have to make this decision as I am going through boxes during the great cleaning process.  With some photos it's clear:  I'm keeping all the portraits of him.  But what about all those pictures he took during the brief time he used a camera?  What about the photo albums I put together for him after my retirement, when I collected all the pictures, developed at Costco, and put them together for him to look at with the caregivers?

And what about pictures like this?  I pulled this one out of an album about Russia.  It's an image of me walking through an Imperial Russian garden.  Almost all of his pictures are of landscape, flowers, and buildings but there's an occasional picture of his wife.  I look at this image and see how far away he is standing, how I'm alone in the picture (no folks around me) and how I am walking away.  I wonder about what he was thinking when he took this picture, if anything.  He was ever a mystery to me, his mind one that worked so differently from mine.  All I know is that he loved me and wanted to care for me.

Unfortunately, for much of our time together, I felt like he loved me "in spite" of who I was instead of because of who I was.  I wonder how my feelings about him and my weak understanding of him will change over time.  I have found that I've already been forgetting what a humongous pain in the ass he could be, with his Eeyore-like negativity and his yelling at the servants.  How many times did I feel horrified, annoyed, or embarrassed by his angry outbursts, outbursts the effects of which had disappeared for him while they were still roiling me.  

Instead, I have been remembering times like this -- when we traveled together as the best companions and friends.  The Will who chose joy and pleasure over irritation.  The person who seemed able to simply experience the material world like a big kitty without having to churn everything into meaning, like his wife.

That is the Will I miss every day.