Monsters from the Id

Pam on a trip to Redcar in a red coat. 

                                     

 Dad's parents, mum and Pam.

Pam in Taos

Pam visited me about five times here in New Mexico. I think these photos were her first visit. Here I took her to Taos Pueblo. This is her just outside the Pueblo calling the horses..

Mum and Dad came for the wedding this June and I took them to Taos. I got them to stand in all the places that I took photos of Pam...

And always some silly ones.. Pam then wearing a scarf that she knitted herself...

And me this year..

So now let me share with you Pam's trip out here at the end of 2003. We bought wool in Taos and she knitted a lovely scarf for me. She got her plane times mixed up so ended up staying an extra few days. We watched the film 28 Days Later and giggled like kids chasing each other round the room like the infected flesh eaters. Pam was particularly good at it and had me quite convinced a time or two! I don't think I've laughed so much since.. And of course she got her dog fix..

God these photos make me cry... sorry it's been so long getting this together.. You can probably imagine why..

Manchester Sisters

that's what they called us. we were singing in a bar in Long Island, NY. we are very young and they called us Manchester sisters..because that's where we're from.. just look at us..

3 years

Today is 3 years since Pam was killed. As usual (as usual?) I would have gone up the Sandia Peak and put flowers at the foot of a tree. But it's closed as fire danger is extreme.  So we will go to the cabin and I'll sprinkle some flowers into the river. These family photos were taken a year before her death. Doesn't she look beautiful? She is wearing the cardigan that I clung onto the weeks following while my heart was breaking. I keep it in a plastic bag as suggested so as to try to preserve her smell. This weekend I feel like all the life has gone out of me.... again.. 

My parents were just over for the wedding. I asked dad to bring some old journals of mine. I found this entry..

Jan 4 1994

How protective I was today when Pam left to go to the station. I couldn't resist saying, "Don't ask a strange, horrible man for directions." Pam said, "I'll find a man and say to him, 'Are you horrible?' and he'll say, 'Yes,' evilly.  Then I'll say, 'Can you direct me to the station?' and he'll say, 'Yes and let me stab you horribly.'" I must stop being so protective it makes Pam have no confidence in her own abilities. Nice to see her so fun-filled and excited last night. She has been so irritable and snappy of late.

There is a sadness in Pam's face in these shots I think.  Like so many photos of her, a sadness, a suffering. She was unhappy so much in life. Sometimes I would say to her, "You wouldn't DO anything would you?" I meant to end it. She would say, "No Jane, I would never do that to you lot." But look what happened, her life did end early. Perhaps on some level I sensed something coming..

Got married

Wish Pam could have been there...

Reading this made me cry this morning..

A loss of this magnitude - psychologically, it is a loss of the heroic defense - draws the psyche into liminality, which may be coloured most heavily by feelings of grief for a lost past. Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal imagos and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. It had been embedded in a context created and supported by an archetypal pattern of self-organisation, and now, since this matrix has dissolved or broken down, there is a sense of amputated past and a vague future. Yet while this ego hangs there in suspension, still it remembers the ghost of a former self, whose home had been furnished with the presence of persons and objects now absent and had been placed in a psychological landscape now bare and uninhabitable without them. There is memory, too, perhaps, of status, of secured supremacy amidst a host of valiant defenders of the realm. But now all is different.

Murray Stein, In Midlife

Night Flight

The Christmas before the plane crash. Look what I bought Pam's husband Keith.  I wish I'd known how dangerous it was. I see in the news nearly ever week a small plane crash. I didn't know. I would never have noticed this before. This was his last Christmas.