Pages of wedding album hold bittersweet memories
Posted by Dennis Anderson on May 15th, 2007
Julie and I have a bookshelf that takes up most of one wall in our front room. On that bookshelf are stories of our life together so far. It’s also where we keep our wedding album.
Late one evening recently, Julie and I were reading in the front room. After finishing the latest copy of People, Julie picked up our wedding album and started leafing through it.
For being nearly 22 years old, the photo album has held up pretty well. I’ll attribute its condition to Julie’s nurturing ways.
We had one of those big Italian weddings, complete with a football-field-long sweet table. My mother-in-law, Dina, was so proud of that sweet table that she had the wedding photographer take a picture; it’s in our wedding album. The photographer also took group photos of each table, from our dearest friends and relatives to the group of people we worked with eons ago.
After thumbing through the group photos, Julie said, “21 of these people are dead.”
Intrigued, I took a gander. Sure enough, there was my dad and Julie’s dad, my Gram and Papa, and Julie’s Nona. There were also friends of our parents, and others who are no longer with us.
Our trip down memory lane was bittersweet.
The other day while we were driving to my son’s baseball game Julie got a call from her sister, Toni. She said her brother-in-law, Joe, was dead. He died suddenly at age 49. He left his wife Cindy and their three young children. Joe is the first of our contemporaries to pass.
We spent the rest of the drive shaking our heads, asking why Joe and why now. Joe and Cindy and Julie and I shared many laughs and beers by the lake on summer nights at my in-laws’ cottage in Lake Geneva, Wis. There’s a photo of Joe and Cindy in our wedding album.
During the ride home from the ballgame, I said to Julie, “Add Joe to that list.”
“I already thought of that,” she said.
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