She just won't go away

I would say that this is funny but I can't, because it's painful.

I don't really remember what made me pull out a couple of photographs of my mom from our family photo album earlier this year, but I did. At first, they were in our living room because my room mate wanted to have pictures of my mom out there. But then I had sesshin, and it was right after my 41st birthday, and I was freaking out about whether my mom was alive or dead. I had dokusan with Blanche and she recommended that I spend some time with a photograph of my mom and so I moved the photo to the mantel above my bed.
Then I had a big shift during sesshin and that photograph evoked a much more truthful understanding of the reality of my time with my mom: we lived together for six years and also she died. Both those things are true: in the photo, both of us are happy and healthy and she died four years after that photograph was taken.
The photo has been sitting on my mantel ever since and I just can't seem to pass it without looking at it. Each time that I do, my mom shifts shape in response to where I'm at in the grieving process.

During sesshin, she became real- an actual person, not just my mom but a woman in her late thirties with real hopes and desires and a life before I was born.
About three weeks after the memorial ceremony, she became real too, but in a different way. It was like she was physically real. She had arms and legs and muscles and it was like she was walking out of the photograph.

This was surprisingly hard for me. For some reason, I didn't want her to walk out of the photograph. I wanted her to go back in that photograph and be my mom. I wanted to be that little girl, all happy and safe and cared for. I didn't want my mom to be a real person with arms and legs, with suffering and pain, I wanted her to go back to that ideal I had held on to for so long. 

It's the greatest irony that now that she's actually here, now that she's an actual person, walking out of that photograph; I, the person who never wanted to "let go" of her, refused to say goodbye to her, and did everything I could to hold on to her, now find myself wanting her to go away. I've tried to make her go away by turning away from the photograph, hoping that the next time I look at it, she won't be climbing out anymore, but it doesn't work. Each time I look at it, she's there. And there's more of her each time: freckles, legs with calf muscles, curls at the end of her hair. It's pretty funny that she's coming right into my room and I'm trying to push her away.

I wish I could laugh at this, but I can't, because it hurts. It hurts that she's real, that she isn't the person in the photograph anymore. She isn't 41, I'm no longer six.
I don't know what I am, I don't know what she is, but neither of us exist in that photograph anymore.