December 2, 2023

One of my cousins posted her wedding pictures in honor of their 20th anniversary. They were a beautiful bride and groom; not any less beautiful two decades later. My parents are in a group photo just barely 70 and 72. My mother was terribly thin, her face tight around her smile. Knowing her health and state of mind in 2001 is the only reason I detected the strain in her smile. Her recovery from heart surgery a couple of years before was difficult, leaving her deconditioned and she was beginning to suffer chronic pain from advancing osteoporosis. Dad never looked at ease smiling and it’s difficult to read the emotions in his face. No surprise there. I once described him as a vapor moving in and out of our lives because his drive to make his daughters’ lives the antithesis of his own boyhood.

My mother’s strain—while known to me—was hidden under carefully styled hair and impeccably applied dark red lipstick serving a beautiful contrast to her lovely navy silk shirtwaist dress. My father’s Hawaiian shirt coordinating with her dress, his buff colored linen slacks snappy and highly ordinary. At my mother’s funeral and again at my father’s everyone commented on what an attractive couple they made for over half a century. And they did, especially in their twenties. But aren’t all twenty-somethings suffering under the first brush of marriage and love beautiful?

It was a bit jarring but sweet to see them in that photo, out of the usual context of photos featuring me, my sister, or our children. At first glance, they look carefree much like the old photos. I have a box of photos featuring pictures of my parents in adult spaces. One of my favorites is sadly missing from the box. My is mother laughing, no doubt over private and spicy jokes with her bridge friends; they are huddled around a card table in the family room, the table strewn with cards, ashtrays, and cocktail glasses. The photo here is part of series when they were posing together and separately in front of their first house. I love how she struck a then popular fashion pose, caught mid-step, as if she is surprised by the camera’s snap, almost flirtatious and coy. To look at just those photos without memories of her, one would think she moved through her life carefree and joyful.

But that would be a fictive history. No on captured photos of her helpless on the couch faltering under the weight of depression and disappointment; nor is there film footage of her raging at me or my sister because of god knows why. The true story is important but the brave face carefully set in a smile at a wedding is perhaps more important. More telling.