HOW TO REMEMBER I’m compiling the last photo album of him. Which pictures are keepers? Which are redundant and which are forgettable? Him at twenty-four, motorcycle in the cul-de-sac, me as a toddler on his lap, both of us wearing the same ornery family grin. The ones of him among us, his fingers a sneaky rabbit above the head of whoever got stuck next to him. The ones of him holding his own child, the sense he might at last be grown beyond all we hoped he’d leave behind. Which is needed more now, to remember him truthfully or to remember him generously? What to do with these images of all that he took from others, all that he stole and stored and hoarded in that dark house of his? Images of absence, crimes no one will speak of. These glimpses of the people you love calling you every name but your own. What to do, gather all of this together, not discard a single one, grieve what was and wasn’t all at once? Or to choose—call it gleaning, call it curating, call it embellishing, call it simply,
Nice piece about your Uncle. You paint a good picture.