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  Snapshots in time 
 by phineyj  

 (Cameron)

It's Emily's idea. She wants a photo album to take back to college with
her. Something physical she can handle, not just pictures on a computer
screen. You can't even remember the last time you made an actual album,
and then you realize that it was the one you did after your wedding. You
remember how Greg refused to get involved, he said, if you recall
correctly, "If you want to spend the weekend sticking photos of us gurning
in a book so we can embarrass our grandchildren, be my guest." But you
caught him looking at it one time, when you got back home earlier than he
was expecting. 

After a short search, you find the album wedged between old copies of the
New England Journal of Medicine and piano sheet music in the study, and
get it down for a look. Emily exclaims over the clothes; your dress,
apparently, is "Cool," but the men's clothes are "Like, so old-fashioned.
They have ties on, mom!" Greg managed to dodge most of the photos, but
there's one, snapped by Lisa you guess, of the two of you together in a
corner, looking at each other, not the camera, and you gaze at it for a
long time until Emily nudges you and you turn the page. 

You spend the rest of the morning together at the computer, going through
folders and folders of digital photos, picking the ones out you both like
best and saving them. There's Emily as a baby, in her father's arms; they
were best friends immediately, and you feel a flash of long-forgotten
guilt. You had a protracted, painful labor with her and it took a few
weeks before you could bond at all with this strange little alien you had
produced; you've never told anyone that, you felt too ashamed. It did
pass, but you sometimes wonder if your daughter was a daddy's girl right
from those first few crucial weeks.

You pick out photos of the three of you doing things; trips to the park,
vacations - all taken by you, up to the point where Greg got the latest,
greatest model of digital camera and after that you weren't allowed to
operate it. After that, there's a lot more of you. As Emily reaches ten or
eleven, there's more of her and her father, trips you didn't go on,
occasions you weren't around to witness. You feel guilty again because the
evidence is here in front of your eyes that your career took you away from
her.

Emily is sorting though pictures of her and her dad, on one of their trips
to the monster trucks; you can't remember where you were on this occasion
- a conference maybe, or perhaps you just didn't have enough vacation, and
she turns to you, tears in her eyes, and asks, "Does this get easier?" and
you don't know what to say, because you have lost so many people now, and
it gets older, but not easier. 

Later, you find the one remaining place in Princeton which does photo
printing and they point you in the direction of a stationery store where
you can get an album. Emily spends the rest of the evening sticking the
prints in. And the next week, when you're waving her off back to college
in her rust-bucket of a car - the cello she's carrying round in it is
probably worth more than the car itself, you reflect - she has the album
with her, carefully packed inside a padded envelope. 

Your home is very quiet without her, and you wander restlessly from room
to room, wondering what to do with the remainder of the day.

In the end, you spend it sitting on the couch with the wedding album open
on your lap, thinking of things that were, things that might have been and
how these snapshots float in time, like branches on a stream, carrying you
away from the people you love and the person you were. 

(Cuddy)

"Just look how many people showed up." That's your first thought. And then
you glance at Allison, sitting straight-backed beside you, and you think
that a lot of them are here for her as much as for Greg. She's always been
an intensely private person, but she's helped a lot of people - patients,
colleagues, students - and people don't forget that. 

You remember when Greg had to leave his post at PPTH. It was after you
moved on. You had to, you'd done all you could there over more than
fifteen years; it was time to hand over to someone else. And there were
other things you wanted to explore while you had the chance. You hoped
against hope he would get on with the new administrator; you thought
Allison's calming influence would make a difference; you hoped he was
really over James's death (you weren't). But as usual, he went too far,
pushed too much and he found himself out of a job.

You remember how at that time he used to call you up deliberately to pick
fights; he was missing having a team to argue with, and you guess Allison
wasn't invariably up for a spot of differential diagnosis over the
breakfast table. You didn't mind; you always enjoyed sparring with him. It
was like having something to sharpen your mind on, and sometimes you won.

You think of how good he was with Emily; who would have thought Greg House
would make a go of being someone's dad? You watch her pick up her bow and
close your eyes as the notes of Faur's Elegy fill the room. And as the
melancholy music spirals and drifts over the rows of somberly-dressed
people, you think you lost one of your best friends, and life will have
that much less color in it from now on. 

  
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