I laughed when I saw this picture recently. Mostly because the baby is looking at daddy’s belly button with so much inquisitive curiosity. It's like it’s the best thing he’s found so far. It makes me smile. I didn’t notice what he was looking at with such joy when I took the picture.

I didn’t notice it when I looked at the picture after I took it. I probably didn’t notice what the baby was doing after I put the camera down. I went back to real life for a moment taking it all in. We don’t scrutinize things in the moment, the way you do when you look back on a picture.

Now I think… that was the last family activity we ever did. Daddy died 8 days later. I still can’t believe that. How much my life would change in just a few days. I was just at the pool enjoying my life the way I knew it.

The thing about this picture that really captured my attention the first time is Grant’s facial hair. Our entire marriage and from since I met him, he had been clean shaven without so much as 24 hours of stubble ever. He did have enough facial hair that he did get that 5 o'clock shadow, but it was gone within hours or the next morning.

So, as I stared at his dead body in the casket, it really didn’t look like the man I had been married to for nearly 13 years, that guy shaved his face. The last time I saw Grant, I kept thinking, that can’t be him. No, that’s not him. Grant is still gonna come home, the real him is somewhere...

Of course that wasn’t true. But I couldn’t recognize him lying there dead. It wasn't just from the changes that come to a body when it’s dead, it was the facial hair. I just couldn’t see him in there with it on. It was so foreign to the large majority of his life.

I did really like it, but it was meant to be a phase. To change in the near future, grow, be cut off, grow longer, change shapes even. That goatee wasn’t meant to stay like that, burned into my mind for eternity as the last look I’d ever have of my husband. It seemed so odd to leave him looking like that.

I almost asked the mortuary to shave it off. I didn’t because his face looked horrible anyway, it wouldn’t have improved anything. Also, it was there when he died, because he had it, and that was how he died. So I didn’t ask.

I don’t think I would have liked him shaved while dead either. Come to think of it, I just didn’t like him dead, but that was not a choice I had. He was dead. I didn’t like it. There was nothing I could do to change that. That sucks.

I didn’t like the facial hair either and that was something I could have changed but didn’t. I chose not to alter it. The fact that he was dead, I had no choice to change that. So many things that felt out of my control and they were. That was one small thing in my control to change and that control didn't make me feel any better.