When my grandmother died on Jan. 3rd, 2005 and for the months after, the pictures of her on the piano, in the garage, didn’t mean much to me. I wanted to see HER, not her pictures. That’s changing.

This morning, while playing the piano, I kept looking at a picture of her, looking like I remember her. Her strong worn out hands, her thick black-gray hair nicely done, wearing a blue sweater over her shoulders buttoned only at the top, sitting on a chair from Nicaragua, rocking our smiling Canela who was one at the time. There she is looking at the camera, (grandparents seem to never want to look at the camera), and smiling, seemingly looking right at me. The picture means a lot to me now. It made me cry, it made me smile, it made me remember.

In some ways this is a sign that I’m forgetting her physical presence. You know, as in ‘yesterday my grandma and I went to Kmart.’ We don’t do that anymore, and so all I have left are our memories. Pictures are memories, and so I find my grandmother in them more and more.

Amazing, weird, comforting. It’s part of the process of grief. It stinks but you have to do it to survive and live.