Sobering news on a Scottish Road

My refrigerator is covered with pictures of family and friends. There are postcards sent from vacations, old Christmas cards and family portraits from Sears. Some people I don’t even know and some people I know too much about. For instance, we have at least two pictures of three brothers. In one picture, the brothers are little guys and in the next they are growing up fast. To the glancing eye these would be happy holiday portraits. However, I know that their father recently died of cancer. This ruins these pictures for me. I look at their happy, strong faces and I know that they are putting up a front for the camera. They are really thinking: my dad is dead, get this picture over fast.
There is also a photo of a happy couple. They are holding each other in a wedding-style embrace. These people live as close to me as anyone that I know. However, I might as well be a stranger to both of them. I hear about their differences from D and I fear for the happiness of the both of them. One is as straight as an arrow and the other has been everything to everybody except herself. Some people have harder rows to hoe than others and I think that she has a long one.
Perhaps the saddest picture on my refrigerator is of Chris and Monica. In the picture they are young and obviously in love. They shared the tiniest little duplex in Athens. Chris ended up being a professor at a small college in Springfield, Illinois, and Monica ended up leaving Chris for another professor on the same campus. I know this because both Monica and her new lover (sweet Gary Swee as D and I call him), stayed at our house for a weekend (while she tried to show him her old life). I felt like I betrayed Chris by having such a person stay in my home. Years later when D and I were visiting mutual friends in Scotland, we found out that Monica had died in a car accident. To say that the wind was knocked out of us was to say the least. Yet, her picture keeps smiling at us, telling us that she was happy once.
I don’t say these things to make the reader sad. I say them because life is passing at a pace that we cannot comprehend. Pretty soon we are all just faces on pictures on refrigerators. Always let the people that you love know you love them. Sometimes it takes extra effort, but suddenly you are not here anymore.