Three Smiles from Heaven.

I was so excited to see my cousin at church last Sunday. We are a very close-knit family so he's more like a brother to me. We hugged each other so tight because it seemed like it's been forever since I last saw him. His daughter dropped his Bible on accident and a few photos fell out. 

I immediately helped her pick them up, but I could help but notice two particular pictures I don't even remember taking. "Deon" I asked my cousin. "When did we take these pictures?"  

He said he couldn't remember but we were all there! I couldn't hold back the tears as I stared at the faces in those two pictures. 

Our family has had its share of tragic losses. My great aunt, which was Deon's grandmother, passed away from cancer a few years prior and our family was never the same. She was the rock of our brood after her mother passed away. We never claimed to be perfect, but once we lost those two, the propinquity of our family unit was solid. 

Then we experienced a tenebrous five months of heartache, tragedy, and anguish after losing Deon's little brother to gunfire and my sister in a horrific automobile crash. 

We were grief-stricken and bewildered by what was happening in our family. The regret of wishing we had more time to spend with one another. The void we now have because our loved ones are gone and will never return. All the life we have left, and we must experience it without them. 

When I saw those two photos, my heart beamed and there was an unexplainable joy in my soul. I guess that's why my eyes welled up with tears.  

The whole crew was there! One picture had all of us kids in it; me and my two siblings, Deon and his four siblings and our three other cousins. The second one pictured me, my mom, her four first cousins and my great aunt was dead center. 

There was a jovial look on everyone's face in each photo. It took me back to much happier times in our family. We stood in the rear of the sanctuary trying to brainstorm when we could have taken these pictures.  

He has been carrying them in his Bible for the past five years since his grandmother's passing. They were the only two salvageable photos from this old disposable camera he'd found in her basement. I didn’t even know photo labs still processed disposable camera film, but as luck would have it, he found someone who could develop them, and these two stills came out perfect. 

We will never know what the other twenty-five shots contained. What other memories we would unlock, or the guessing game of “where and when” regarding the pictures. All I knew was my insides were leaping to hold this treasured nostalgia in my hands. 

We stood and talked a little while longer, reminiscing on past happenstances. All the happy memories of us kids growing up. Spending the night at each other's houses for days on end. I was the oldest out of the bunch, so not only did my siblings look up to me as the big sister, but my younger cousins did as well because of our kinship.  

I babysat all the kids. One of the things Deon and I shared was how we would play school and he was the only one out of the whole squad that would pay attention. My brother and his oldest brother are the same age, and they were the class clowns. My sister and his sister were a year apart and although they weren’t acting out, they weren’t paying attention either. Lastly, there were his two little brothers. Being toddlers, all they wanted to do was to be held. Especially the baby of all; we were sewn together at the hip. I have always called him “my first baby”. 

I can remember when I had my first child, he was about five and he came up to me in all sincerity to say “Mia, am I still your Boo-boo?”   

Boo-Boo was a nickname I called him often and I was literally the only person that could call him that. He was twenty-six when he was gunned down and up until that time, I still called him by his nickname. His death rocked my life because I had never even lost a family member in this way before. You hear it all the time, especially growing up in what used to be a semi-suburban area, but you never thought your family would be exposed to such misfortune. 

It broke our family down to see his mother wail the way she did. I kept saying to myself, “we JUST talked!” And we did because his birthday was six days prior. I texted him: Happy Birthday! I love you always Boo-Boo. I hope you enjoy your day! He of course replied, “Thank you, I love you too.” 

When we arrived to the location of his demise, they wouldn’t let any of the family see his body because it was a crime scene. We wanted to break the barricades and hold him one last time. But it wasn’t possible. At his funeral, we vowed to remain close, but it was during the pandemic and the threat of being infected was too great of a risk. We kept in touch for a little while only for that to fizzle quickly. 

Only God could have prepared us for what happened next. Within a matter of five months to the day of my little cousin’s murder, my only sister hit an expressway wall and was killed instantly.  

If anyone would have told me my life would be this way, I probably wouldn’t have believed them. Like are you kidding? Not my sister; there is NO WAY my little sister is dead! 

I stood in disbelief when the county sheriffs handed my father her identification.  

My sister and I were TIGHT! I had just seen her because she visited me just two days prior. We hung out for a little while before she went into each one of my kid’s rooms to give them some flack, only as an auntie would. And before she left, we joked around about our childhood traumas. Things we could look back on and laugh about now, but it didn’t seem funny living it out in real time. We hugged and said, “I love you, see you later”.  

But later never came.  

It’s inconceivable how life can change in an instant. Two near and dear people to my heart gone in a heartbeat.  

Our new reality was to live without them. Two links in our family chain were broken forever. Two of my kids, as I used to call them, have been ripped away from me.  

My heart would never beat the same.  

But even still, I can look at these photos and see the love. I kept scanning them with my eyes in disbelief, shaking my head with a grin. 

“You want to snap a pic of them?” Deon asked me. I was too overwhelmed to even ask but I quickly ran to the front of the church where my belongings were to grab my smartphone so I could capture these cherished keepsakes.  

We finally hugged and parted ways only because the church staff was turning off the lights. Kind of giving us the signal of: you don’t have to go home but you have to get up out of here!  

The whole evening, I stared at my gallery; swiping from left to right so that I could see both pictures. I would cry for a little while, then laugh and smile. I could literally hear my great aunt saying something hilarious, as she would often do. I honestly cannot tell anyone what event transpired that begat those pictures, but I am overjoyed to possess these precious memories. 

Rest on, auntie, little sister and little brother! I miss y’all down here!