She wasn't one for smiling in photos and for her happiness to be captured on film at my wedding meant so much to me.
We had a memorial slideshow at her funeral today. On Monday I had gone with my Dad and Uncle to the production office to drop off photos to be scanned and received confirmation that yes, my photo had been received via email and would be included.
Today I watched the screen and through my tears I saw my Nanna as a beautiful young bride cutting her wedding cake; as a mother with my Dad in her arms; as a grandmother with a chubby Aunty Penny in her lap; as an old lady with curlers in her hair.
Then it ended. And my photo was nowhere to be seen.
I keep trying to tell myself it's just a photo, but I'm so sad and angry that it was forgotten.
Her time in the nursing home, where Tricky and I would visit her every few weeks or so, has robbed me of my memories. I don't want to remember her like that, I don't want anyone to remember her like that, and yet visions of her wasting away in there are all I can recall right now. Today it's all I see when I close my eyes, as if it's been burned in to the back of my eyelids.
I need to be able to think of her and see this photo, smiling and happy on a special day, not the 26kg shell of a woman she was in her last few days.
As with life, there is no do-over of a funeral. There is no "sorry we fucked up, here's another slideshow". And I feel robbed all over again.
So after being let down by a company that took a sizable chunk of money from my family and didn't deliver, I'll use my crappy little corner of the interwebz to immortalize her. I'm pretty sure it's not in the "How to be a Mummy Blogger handbook" but right now I don't care.
