The aging laminate crinkled beneath her wizened hands as she turned another page. Nestled behind the yellowing plastic were small square reminders of vacations and birthday parties. Evidence, she thought, of a life well spent.  She lingered over a photo of a small boy playing in the sand, his chubby little fingers digging the moat for what would be his greatest sand castle ever. “Little Jack.” A smile tugs at the corners of her lips as she turns another page. She traces another photo with the same hands that had nurtured, guided, and raised that same little boy into the man that stared back at her from the plastic housing, prideful in his graduation cap. Her cheeks burned as the smile, fully formed, spread across her face.

“Mother?”

The room became alive around her.  A flurry of laughter and voices murmured in a sort of controlled chaos that surrounded her as she clutched the photo album to her chest.

“Mother, its time.” Her son, Jack, held his arm out to her, his smile matching her own.  She stood, taking her sons arm as the invitation to his wedding slipped from her lap. She had forgotten to place it in the photo album where her memories are kept safe. She gazed up at her boy whose face had become blurry from her tears.

“I know ma,” Jack said, pulling her close. “I love you too.”  

Her hands felt brittle. Old. Like the yellowing laminate from the dusty old photo album she couldn’t ignore anymore. Whiskey coated her mouth and tongue in a bitter fuzz she hadn’t bothered with any attempt to remove. She had told herself to stay away, to not live in the past—to move on. But with each turn of a decaying page filled with memories of long ago, her heart would tighten in her chest until she was convinced it had turned to stone.

Her hands, arthritic and wrinkled beyond her years, traced the photograph of a young man whose smile held with it the promise of a bright future.

“Mary?” She doesn’t turn to the voice that sounds so much like him. She tunes out the din of voices that are gathered in her living room eating cake and poorly made casserole.  Instead, she turns another page even when her mind is telling her that they would be empty.  She reached over the couch to where the contents of her purse lay strewn across the cushions, and snatched up a small piece of paper that had begun to shrivel from the storm of tears from when she first read it.  Trembling, she placed her son’s funeral program into the empty page.