Crash course in grief

On Saturday, August 22nd, one of my dearest friends and her two children were involved in a car accident. My friend and her daughter didn't survive. Her son is still in the hospital and everyone in our community is rallying behind him and his father in hopes he'll recover without too much lasting damage. It's basically a miracle that he even survived at all.
Tiffany was my son's second mom. We babysat each other's children very frequently. We were like one big family. We were going to grow old together and watch our kids grow up and be lifelong friends. I stopped explaining to people that our kids weren't actually siblings. I've known her for eleven years and in the last two of those, we have been closer than ever. She left her partner a few months ago and actually moved into the apartment right next to mine. It's been rough, both being on our own and struggling to care for our children. It was a struggle to have each others' backs but also to take care of our own needs, and I regret that in the last couple months, we stopped babysitting for each other because taking on extra children was getting to be a lot of work. That's the problem with thinking something is going to last forever. You think you will have time later to make up for it.
She was my biggest supporter in all of my creative works, especially photography. I show my love through my lens and I wanted to document their family any time she would let me. I'm so glad we had this photo shoot. I pressured her into it and she even skipped out on work to do it. I never could have imagined photos from this shoot would become photos on their obituaries. It hurts my heart so much.

But
Her son is alive, and it was my responsibility this week to go through her computer, camera, old phones and any memory cards to recover photos. Not only have I spent six years documenting her pregnancies and children's little moments, but now I have a lot of her photos as well. I would love to make memory books for her son. For mother's day this year, I made her a book with motherhood quotes that went along with the pictures I've taken and she loved it. Now I need to do something like that on a larger scale. It's a big task, but no one else that I know does any digital scrapbooking and it's so important that Marshall has something to hold onto instead of only something to scroll through.


So now I've had this firsthand experience with what it means to leave a legacy. I've been a huge slacker lately with documenting our life, especially beyond cell phone photography. I need to record more quotes. Save more moments.
"In the blink of an eye" and "nothing lasts forever" and "now or never" used be ideas to me. Things that I logically understood, but now I can feel them in my heart.

I'm numb today. It's been a very, very rough week. I'm not entirely sure how grief goes as I've never lost anyone this close to me before. I just know I'll be using art therapy to get through this, and I'll be using the Lilypad products to help tell the stories of two beautiful people.