Pictures and Ralph

Today I was talking to K, I told her I had some frames I need to put pictures in and hang them on the walls. I am still in the process of getting the house back together. Little did I know when I told her this how hard this process would be. I hung the frames on the wall so I knew where they were going and could decide from there what photo's to put in them. Frames are up, now it is time to flip through pictures, this was the hard part. I found a stack of pictures and a folder of them to flip through quickly. One of the first ones I came across was a photo that Faith, then 3(2 months from her 4th b-day), took the best photo of Joel and I, it was on the day that Joel left for Iraq, Jan 6th. We are standing together, my arms around his waist, I am kind of hanging on him and he is just grinning at Faith. I remember both of us saying, our heads will probably be cut off. When I got that roll developed, that was one of the best pictures in the whole stack. I took that photo and had picture ID tags made for him (along with a photo of him and the girls, the one you see in all the newspaper articles with him and the girls) and sent them as a valentines day present. He wore them on his ID tags all the time, they were on him the day he died. I found this picture and I lost it, completely broke down and I had a flood of memories come back to me. Memories of that day, thinking it is only a year and tomorrow it will be one day down, 355 to go. I remember taking that photo into work, having it on the outside of my locker, everyday. Looking at it daily and sometimes crying because I missed him so much. The one thing that came back and brought more tears was something that a gentleman I worked with, Ralph, always said to(I will use his name because not to many people know him by his first name). I would talk to him a lot in the mornings when I got to work early and everyday after Joel left and he saw that picture, he would say, "CPT Cahill, that picture of you and your husband is wonderful, I look at it everyday when I go get the linen out of the locker room, it brings a smile to my face. You can see how much you love your husband." I cannot count the times he said this to me, he even brought it up in morning report a few different times, embarrassing as it was at times, it made me feel so good and proud of my husband and what we have, or had.....I love that picture. It still remains my favorite of us. I thank Ralph for always bringing that up to me, for reminding me of what I had with my husband and that he could see the love in our faces. Little did I know how much that picture would come to mean to me. I pulled it out today and will keep it on my bedside table for a long time to come. As I continued to flip through the photo's(after all the tears stopped and I could smile at the memories), I found a small stack of photo's of the girls and Joel when he was home on R and R. While everone was here after Joel's death, someone brought something up to me about these photo's, something that I never saw before. These photo's took place at a park, on a swing near a river and Joel is holding the girls in his lap, the first one, they are all looking at me, smiling and waving, the second one, Joel is looking at me, smiling..waving, the girls are looking up at the sky, the next one, it is Joel with Faith, then Joel with Bren, then Faith by herself, then Bren by herself, then a picture of the girls, alone on the bench, looking sad and away from me. I did not ever put this together, but someone said to me, it was if they knew, as if in those photo's something or someone was telling them that they would be without him at some point. It broke my heart.....I never saw that before....I never looked at it that way....Just photo's that I snapped because I wanted a lot of pictures of us together, having fun. I see those pictures and that is what I think. I see my girls looking up to heaven and my husband looking at me, and I feel my heart breaking again, wanting to go back to that day and erase it all.....I know I can't, I know I need to be greatful that I have those pictures, those memories, these moments as hard as they are. It just plain sucks somedays.....I can't wait for those days or moments to be farther apart.