110 months into your precious life… 110 months gone today…
Today. December 2005. This is where I am.
I chose a couple of Christmas photos to share.
Looking through these memories takes me back to when you were introduced to Tim Burton films. The Nightmare Before Christmas — the coffin-shaped DVD box set you were gifted from Santa — and Corpse Bride were among your favorites. I still have your Jack Skellington blanket, and I think the beanie is stashed away somewhere… or Logan may have confiscated it. My memory isn’t always the greatest. Someday it will resurface like a small, unexpected gift, right when I need it most.
It’s strange how memory picks and chooses when to show up — when to offer details freely, and when to interrupt with the realization that you had completely forgotten about that.
Things continue to change. I know it’s inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
John and Miriam have moved, and soon a new neighbor will take over the space we all came to know so well. Things I’ll never forget: the SunDrop video you made with your friends — newly formed at the time as Drop It Productions (D.I.P.) — knocking on their door, John opening it, clearly wondering what on earth was happening, and you all “dropping it like it’s hot” right there in the middle of his driveway, in front of him. I still wonder what must have been going through his mind.
Then fast forward to the first day John saw you in your dress blues while you were home on leave after graduation. A young Marine shaking hands with a veteran — also a Marine. A moment frozen in time that I was able to capture on camera.
We shared sixteen years as neighbors. Almost ten of those years were held with your absence — and memories were all we had left to share.
Since you’ve been gone, change hasn’t come all at once — it’s arrived in waves, some quiet, some impossible to ignore. It isn’t just people moving on or time marching forward — it’s the steady disappearance of the life that once surrounded you. Neighbors, routines, places, even the small constants that anchored those years have slowly slipped away. Hazel is the only pet left now from your time here, and even the big brown couch — the one that held so many ordinary moments — will soon fade away too. That reality carries more weight than it should.
Each loss is small on its own, but together they make the absence louder. And that’s the part that breaks my heart — all the pieces quietly disappearing from you.
I have to remind myself that no matter what changes, your moments will always remain whole.
I love you.
I miss you.
You should be here.
~Mom
Daly Chronicles 