The lady in the picture.

Anna Lauyse Markheim died about one year ago now. Since then, I've wrestled with every emotion time and again. I've wailed like a baby, I've shrugged it off as a past concern. I've wondered endlessly what it would be like were she alive today, if she could see my children, watch Malcolm in his first year as a kindergartner, or see Chloe draw amazing illustrations with her left hand. Stephanie and I are trying to have another baby now. My brother Ryan and his wife Heather are already expecting, with three-dimensional sonogram images that would absolutely amaze Mom, could she view them as I have. Ryan recently visited the little riverbank where, on his 28th birthday, he and I buried her ashes last year in a bed of flower bulbs. He held up his cell phone and played the audio recording of his baby's heartbeat to her.

There's a lady who surrounds me and my family. She's in pictures all around. One depicts her dancing with me on my wedding day, the happiest day I've ever known. Another shows the two of us on a family vacation to the United Kingdom, shoulder to shoulder along the Cliffs of Dover. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Ryan and I were unabashedly close to Mom. We did everything together. She packed my high school lunches with the kind of thoughtfulness only a mother knows, and I ate them without embarassment, despite teenage insecurities. She was never a friend - she was always my parent, but one in whom I could confide the world. And now all I have is the lady in the picture, and my memories.

My children will know her through me, as will Ryan's through him. And in that sense, she will live on, though I'll always harbor a sadness for having lost her so soon. Malcolm has the faintest memories of his Nana. Chloe perhaps none at all, and our next baby will only know a name and a tale. But it's something.