I developed the film my wife never got to see

Dear Delyara, My wife loved film photography and left three undeveloped rolls in a drawer when she died. I could not send them away because I was frightened of what might be inside. Four years later, I joined a community darkroom class and learned to develop them myself. Today, the final roll emerged. Most photographs are terrible: a blurred dog, half a building, my elbow, two overexposed flowers. Then there is one of me asleep on the sofa with our granddaughter on my chest. I had never seen it. My wife must have taken it quietly. I stood in the darkroom holding the wet print and cried while a twenty-year-old student politely pretended not to notice. Hobbies sometimes return the dead through skill rather than memory. My wife loaded that camera. Her finger pressed the shutter. My hands finished what hers had started years later. The photograph is drying in my kitchen tonight.