The Picture You Discover When You Wait 12 Years to Sort Through Wedding Proofs

I do not recommend waiting twelve years to sort through wedding proofs.

But I can easily understand how it can happen!

Way leads to way…And here we are folks!

We’ve arrived at this morning’s consolation.

If I had sorted through these proofs a dozen years ago, I would have seen this picture of myself, with my Aunt Sherrie holding my arm in the air, dancing, entangled with my mom and my loved ones on the dance floor.

I would have been 29, okay 30, if I dragged my heals, but had accomplished this task in a reasonable timeframe. And I would have a lovely wedding album filled with artistry — I picked gorgeous wedding photographers.

I don’t have that; I have a small red Samsonite personal-effects suitcase, with an indestructible shell and a combination lock — A wedding gift — which stores hundreds of photographs in small envelopes.

Over the past few years when someone that I know dies, I think there’s a good chance they were at my wedding (there were 225 people in attendance) and I open the suitcase, crouch on the floor and sort through the envelopes.

This is an absurd way to experience the wedding photos; I know this. It’s something that I accept about the hazard of a poet and a rabbi joining in union (and the absence of someone who might have finished this job).

But because it’s 2020 and not 2008, I’m looking at my Aunt, my beautiful beloved (dead) Aunt Sherrie holding up my arm, and she’s only a handful of years older than I am now. And I look more like her in that photograph than I look like myself in that photograph.

And the love and appreciation and yearning that I experience now is so palpable that I feel I could actually pull her out of death with my extended arm. I do.

I don’t need to talk about how she died each time I talk about her life; to me she will always be my vivacious, hilarious, generous Aunt — the woman who drove me to each dress fitting and let all of my poet friends crash on her basement floor.

I mention how she died — suicide — for the sake of the living.

Because we can’t see in this photograph, or any, really, the ways that people who we love are suffering.

And we need to look at that, at them.

I heard someone say, about my Aunt, that people are given two hands by God: one for giving and one for receiving, and that Sherrie used both hands for giving.

The consolation of my ridiculous procrastination: Discovering my own hand forever held to my dear Aunt Sherrie, so that I might, somehow, in some world — even beyond death — hold her up.