Lois and Allan, 1946

Lois and Allan, 1946, originally uploaded by The River Thief.

A year ago today my life as a daughter officially ended with my mother's death. My father and good friend died on Valentine's Day in 1991. On this first anniversary I have just concluded my final duty to my parents, arranging the grave marker for their cremation plot at the North Vancouver cemetery. It was installed yesterday and I have just come back from mailing the cheque to Gerry Brewer, who made this final and amazingly painful duty so much easier. Perhaps it's sad that we have never actually met, but I appreciated not having to make an appointment, being able to select a grave marker online and work with emailed proofs, especially since the interment process was a little fraught for me. I also mailed copies of my parents' wedding film to the three cousins to whom I'm closest. One is featured in the film, as she was my mother's junior bridesmaid, her father shot the film (but still manages to be in it, so I'm not quite sure who else was involved in the filming, perhaps her mother as well), and - well - so many of our relatives are in it that I thought they should have copies.

Over the last few days I've been going through photos, editing, scanning, cropping, adjusting, and posting on flickr in a family photos set I've created.

This morning I found a photo I must have seen several times before but had never really looked at. There are several similar photos of my father during his army years, horsing around with one or another of his sisters, flirting with a local waitress before he 'shipped out' to WWII, striding into his future with a grin on his devilishly handsome face. I hadn't even realized it was my mother in this photo until I looked at it closely this morning. But on the back is written, in my mother's hand: "Aug. 16/46. Lois & Allan. AND THE HAT."

In looking at the photo and reading the date, I suddenly realized this was the first photo ever taken of my parents together, and that it was taken very shortly - probably no more than two weeks - after they had met.

It definitively answers the question that some of my cousins have had the courage to ask, 'What did he see in her?'

My father is not only movie-star handsome in this photo, he is in his prime. Snappily turned out in his newly acquired civvie finery, recently demobbed, he looks proud and determined here. There is no doubt in my mind that he was thinking, as he glanced at the photographer, 'this is the one.' Probably, since it was 1946, it was phrased, 'This is the woman I'm going to marry.'

But it is the look on my mother's face that amazes. The softness, the glow, the yielding tenderness. It's obvious she's captivated.

I wish I had known that woman a little better, the one who, for a brief while anyway, believed that life was full of infinite possibilities and the world was her oyster.