Blurry Memories

About 10 days ago, my parents survived a nightmarish car accident. In Panama.

To say that time stood still while I processed the information and was waiting to hear what their plans were would be an understatement.

Jace and Aj went to St. George that weekend. In a car. They had the nerve to drive somewhere after the accident. In. a. CAR! Of all the things to use to travel in. I was a nervous wreck.

When they returned home safely, I cried. I hugged them and I cried.

I wish I could say that all's well that end's well, but life doesn't stop even though my personal world did. It's still not quite okay for my soft heart that desperately wants to be tough.

It's like when Collin and Uncle Bill died. I needed time. I needed space. But the world is unforgiving in it's demands and obligations.

Thankfully, for me, coming from a big family, I have a built-in support network. My sibs and I spent a really long time chatting on FB. Like, 48 hours. We were hurting. We were exhausted.

And we needed to be together.

We got sent this PHOTO of my parents that sent me into a tailspin. I knew, in my heart, that I had come close to losing my parents. But that picture drilled it into my head. I almost lost my parents. My parents nearly died. If the car had been slightly angled... it just makes me shudder. No one should see a picture like that. NO ONE SHOULD TAKE A PICTURE LIKE THAT. Put the damn phone down and just don't take the picture. Please.

It was like cancer all over again. The what-ifs and the if-onlys and the feeling of complete loss of control. I could not stop shaking.

A few years back, my parents gave all of my sibs and I photo albums of our lives.

In the midst of that crisis, we pulled those out. We pored over those books. We snapped pics of the pics and sent them to each other. We laughed and cried and filled the holes in our hearts with these old, brown, faded photographs.

They were so blurry. And not because of my tears. My parents, as good as they are at so many things,  were  NOT good photographers. Someone always had a goofy look on their face or was not paying attention, had bad hair or was crying. There was 6 of us... someone was always crying.

But, 35 years later, it didn't matter. I touched those photographs and I could almost feel my mom's touch, hear my dad's laugh and revisit the dinner table where EVERYTHING in my parent's house happened.

 They are blurry but they are perfect.

In these days of filters and digital photos and catching that perfect moment all the time, sometimes I delete photos because they are blurry and try again.

But blurry is real. Blurry is love. Blurry memories are really what we all have and I am grateful for every one of them.

And mostly, I'm grateful that we get to make more... because there will never be enough.