What do you miss most about Alan being out of your life?

I think the physical connection. You can’t hug you can’t kiss when there’s no one in the bed next to you. You can’t cuddle up with anything but a pillow on the couch. So I think the physical contact. I don’t want to say connection because you’ve got his voice, so there is that physical connection. So I’m going to say intimacy and affection is what I don’t have.

I was going to say the whole family thing, being part of a family. But really Joyce filled in that void. She comes with me and does a lot of things. We’ll go off with the kids and do things. It may sound kind of mean, but first year it was like wished Alan was here to take all the snap shots. This year it’s kind of like he’s not going to be here so why sit there and obsess about the fact that he’s not going to be there. So I filled it in with Joyce, and her kid and the teenagers, and we go off and we do things.

I’m up here camping and I’m having a great time. You think I would miserable because of the rain, but you know we actually had fun. We were miserable, dripping wet, but we had fun putting that tarp up!

But the one thing that doesn’t work is that she is not him. So it doesn’t work for a physical connection. My kids would have loved to have been down on that rock fishing with their dad and catching pollywogs and crayfish. They’ve said a couple of times “I wish dad was here fishing.” You know, for me I wish he was there so we could sit on the rock watch the stars. I don’t care about fishing.

Tell me about your family portrait?

I went out and had these expensive photographs taken. I had dressed up nice, bought some nice clothes and I went out and had these pictures taken with the kids. I thought it was great until I went to view the pictures. That was the first time that family picture was a lop-sided. It just kept going through my head that I had a square family. Alan was not in the picture and I didn’t realize it was going to bother me like that. It hit but I thought it was like one of those passing things.

So I got them home and I was going to put the picture up on my wall. I had the spot all marked and everything. It stayed there five minutes and then it had to come down because all the pictures in my house have Alan in them. Everything on all my walls has him in the picture. I don’t even have a picture of the boys alone! It’s all family shots.

This one just didn’t fit. It was way out of place. I couldn’t stop looking at it. Then it hit. That was the first time that it hit that he was gone. He’s gone from my family and now he’s gone from my pictures and that was really a traumatic thing.

They went in my bureau drawer and they stayed there. Then one day my mom, who does digital art, said she could fix them. I said, “No we can’t unless you can get him home. You know you can’t fix that.” She said, “Give me that picture. We’ll fix that.” So I gave her the picture I had done and an old picture of Alan.

So she took him out of the old picture and put him into my new picture. So now he’s standing right where he belonged, perfect height and everything. She printed it out on a canvas-type paper and framed it, wrapped it up, and handed it to me. She didn’t tell me what she was doing. I opened it up and said, “He’s back in the picture.” And it went up on my wall.

That was a big hit for me. It was like wow this is real - he is gone. Now he’s back in the picture, he’s on my wall, he’s in my home. Now we take all these prison pictures and she adjusts them. She takes the nametag off so it looks like he’s just wearing a suit. She can put a necktie on him. She can give him hair, take hair away, and shave him, whatever. She can do whatever she wants with him. So she adjusts the pictures and puts backgrounds in so it doesn’t look like a prison picture anymore. When she’s done it looks like another family portrait.

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