It’s taken me three days to take a package out of my mailbox from my brother.
He spent a whole weekend transferring videos he had found in the deep, dark boxes of his life. They were footage of my mother from the three years before her death.
We weren’t a video family. She died in ’99, so it was before smartphones, before everyone had a camera. We had pictures, was about it.
Then my brother called one night, a tone different in his voice, and told me he’d found these videos and had been watching them for a whole weekend, then decided to invest in conversion equipment.
Voila, DVDs.
So, now they’re here. Today. On the day she would’ve been 71.
So how do you go from having nothing but vague memories of a face, a person, who was one of the most pivotal people in your life, to suddenly knowing there’s a stack of DVDs waiting to be seen?
Well, I guess now they’ll sit there on my desk for a while. I’ll become used to them existing in the world. And some day, one day, I’ll have the courage to go there.
But this is not that day.