Journaling:

This is my Nephew Bryan at 4 YO with his new puppy in 1973. The photo is from the old polaroid camera, and is in really bad shape, but masking it took care of a lot of the yellowing and fading of the outer edges of it.This photo is very important and precious to me, because, little did we know that in a short 6 years from then, Bryan would die from an unknown reason. He complained of a headache just before bed, after ramming around in the heat with friends that day. My sister figured he played too hard in the sun, and gave him a pain reliever and sent him to bed, not knowing that, that would be the last time she'd ever talk to him again.When she heard him making a weird noise that next morning, she got up to check on him, but he was rigid, eyes back in his head, and shallow/Gasping for air/fish-out-of-water breathing, and non-responsive. They kept him on life support, for a few days, but with no brain activity to be found, my sister found herself having to make the horrific decision to take him off and lay him to rest. It changed our family in a huge way. One day he was full of life running around playing hard like he always did as a 10 YO, and in an instant, he is gone from our lives forever. A little boy who had a huge love of big trucks and animals. He had a disability that after many tests, the doctors were not able to give a name to. Perhaps a form of retardation, but to this day we don't know. There was an autopsy done with no real answers as to why this happened, so we just had to find a way to accept it.He was the 3rd grandchild born to our family, and the first child to my sister who struggled as a single mom. He was her life, and everything she did was for him. I was a senior in high school at the time, and was the first time I experienced the death of a child in my own family. It seemed so much like a bad dream, and we were all devastated. We still miss him, think and speak of him often, and wonder if now at 35 years old, he would be a semi-truck driver since this is what his father did, and was what he talked about in the years before his death.

Kit-by Kathryn Estry All American boy

https://store.gingerscraps.net/All-American-Boy.html

font SNF Sparrow

Pawprint and mask made with PSe