Two bins of photographs were among the many things I found when cleaning out Willie’s apartment after she moved to assisted living. 

These bins are nearly the size of a loveseat.  

They hold heaps of pictures. Traditional 4-by-6-inch pictures. Larger 8-by-10-inch pictures. Pictures in folders. Pictures in frames. Loose pictures and pictures in envelopes from the developer.  

I found entire photo albums.  

One album was dedicated to a cat we owned for five years in the 1980s. 

I don’t know why. Over our childhood, we owned two hamsters, two gerbils, a rabbit, at least half a dozen cats, two dogs, and countless goldfish. 

That’s not counting the four litters of kittens born in our backyard, the tabby stray who lived with us just long enough to be sterilized, or the frozen cat my husband buried for Willie. 

That cat died unexpectedly. Our vet, aware Indy was away, froze the cat until Indy’s return. 

But Willie couldn’t bear the thought of her cat in the vet’s freezer. She called me in tears. Would my husband bury the cat? 

Be selective about the people you introduce into your family, gang. If you have a parent with no compunction about pleading for your spouse to bury a frozen cat, have a spouse who finds the situation hilarious. 

And is happy to bury the frozen cat. 

As my husband buried the cat, he and I did the Joe Pesci/Robert DeNiro/Billy Batts scene from Goodfellas. 

Willie has never seen Goodfellas.  

Willie decided then and there my husband, with his one-fifth-Italian ancestry, is a mafioso. 

She believes it to this day. 

So maybe you should also be careful about the family you marry into.  

My husband sure wasn’t. 

I wish I had known him when our rabbit was dying.  

I was living at home at the time, working the second shift while attending grad school during the day. Willie knocked on my bedroom door when I was studying one night.  

I say night, but it was well after one o’clock in the morning.  

Willie was crying, holding the dying rabbit in her arms. She planned to crush the cat’s Valium, mix it with water, and inject it into the rabbit to euthanize it. 

“Or,” I said, “we could take Buns to the emergency vet and have them euthanize him?” 

You know, I really should have seen the challenges Willie brought to my caregiving of Indy the night we euthanized Buns. 

And no. I don’t want to talk about why the cat was on Valium. 

Anyway, I don’t know why that particular cat had his own album, but he did. 

And I was stuck deciding what to do with that album and its photographic brethren in the two loveseat-sized bins now living in my garage. 

You’re probably thinking of my generous, cat-burying husband, with two gigantic tubs of photographs occupying his garage. 

Dude, don’t even. That guy has worms in the fridge I bought for the kids’ toaster waffles. The Willie Show may make me less than a prize, but there’s a Styrofoam container of live worms, like, right next to the Coke. 

I’ll be honest. I considered throwing away those bins of pictures. 

Because, really. How long would it take me to sort through them? And how, exactly, had I been anointed arbiter of what we keep and what we toss from Willie’s apartment?  

Then I had an idea. I rallied my siblings and their children. My aunt — Willie’s sister — and her daughter. And, of course, Willie. 

We set up shop at the Temple of Doom. I brought in Willie’s favorite snacks. And I brought a sizeable chunk of those wayward pictures. 

For two hours, we sorted through the pictures. We tossed the blurred photos, the photos with a finger over the lens, the photo Willie and Indy framed — the one of me dancing with a guy most definitely not my husband. 

I mean, please. He wasn’t even in the mafia, that dude. 

We laughed. We cried a little. We fought. 

“Here’s you and Indy,” I said to Willie, showing her a picture.  

“That,” my aunt said, “is me.” 

“If that’s you,” I said, “you’d better have a good reason why you’re nearly in Indy’s lap.” 

My sister decried the dearth of pictures of her, the baby of the family. 

Each time my brother and I showed her a picture we knew to be her, she’d insist it was one of us. 

We never liked her.  

As the night wore on, disputes arose as to the identity of a photo’s subject. Each time, I was called upon to arbitrate. 

“Well,” my husband said, “you’re the only one old enough to have the memories but young enough to not have dementia.” 

Insightful, those mafia guys. 

Sorting through the pictures was like sorting through time. The photos went from black and white to color, from negatives to CDs. The candid photos stop when smartphones become ubiquitous. 

It was like a Smithsonian exhibit. 

Alzheimer’s Texas suggests you refrain from looking at the same pictures on repeat with your demented loved one. “Mix it up,” they say. 

Two sofa-sized bins. 

Done and done.