Now that the initial shock and grief has started to wear off and turn into a different kind of numbness and sadness, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how best to hold on to Steve, for myself, for the kids, and for all the other people who loved him. It is no easy task to be responsible for someone’s memory, especially when you still can’t come to terms with the fact that they’re gone.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with our old family photos. Thank goodness for the digital age and cellphone cameras. I never realized how many truly special moments I captured. It was never my intent, but it is one of the happier accidents that has happened recently.

While I’ve always thought Steve was the best dad, I never gave much thought to why or how he was so amazing. Looking at these photos now, it is just so obvious how central to their young lives he was. He was like a giant jungle gym for our kids when they were little. At least one, if not all three, of them was always hanging on to him, sleeping on him, or riding his shoulders. I know I spent about eight years straight either being pregnant or breast-feeding, and I felt like I always had a kid attached to some part of me, but it was nothing like the way the kids were drawn to Steve. They were just a natural extension of him.

One picture in particular stands out to me. I had been upstairs, folding laundry. When my calls to them to put the laundry away went unanswered, I discovered the four of them asleep on the couch. E is curled up on his lap, A is curled up in his armpit, and even though G is stretched out on the couch, I can see Steve’s hand reaching over A to rest on G’s foot. It was important to Steve to make sure that G was still connected to the rest of them. I remember taking that picture, but more so, I remember looking at the four of them, all tangled up on the couch, and thinking about how lucky I was to have them, and what a shame it was going to be to wake them all up to put their laundry away.

I have so many more pictures of Steve explaining or showing something to the kids, from casting a fishing line, to learning to mini-golf, to teaching them how to box in the living room. In all of them, he is kneeling down, to be on their level, or wrapping his own hands around theirs to show them how to hold something, or focused solely on them. E, in particular, finds great comfort in the happy memories, and almost daily, I find a new one of the two of them together to share with her. I want them to always remember how present he was for them.

We are so fortunate that we had so many good memories together, but this brought up a sore point for at least one member of the family, who felt that we were maybe forgetting that Dad wasn’t always “the fun dad.”

In particular, and this will always be one of the greatest regrets that I have, this last year was stressful. Both Steve and I had noticeably shorter fuses than we’d had in the past. Navigating our jobs through a global pandemic, including remote learning for all three kids, had taken its toll. Familiarity breeds contempt and, boy, did we get familiar with each other during the first year of the pandemic. My decision to start a new job, in a completely new department, last year didn’t help.

Navigating some of the not-so-good memories has been tough. It seems so important to remember all the good we possibly can about Steve right now, because we will never get any more of it, and I am so desperate to hold on to every piece of it that I can. However, the kids aren’t buying the whole “Steve was perfect all the time” routine, and they’ve found a surprising amount of comfort in remembering times that he lost his temper or did something else to upset the apple cart. It’s taken me a while to realize that remembering his flaws helps them to keep him more real in their minds.

Another struggle has been how to walk the line between turning our house into a shrine, and cleaning house entirely. The first few weeks, I was scared to touch anything. First of all, I expected him to come walking in any moment, and begin yelling about how “someone touched his stuff,” a fight we’d been having forever.

Steve was never the most organized person, and he frequently forgot where he put things, and just as frequently blamed everyone else for “touching his stuff.”

In the interest of not getting yelled at, all of us became quite adept at remembering where he put things. It feels like the worst prank on the planet to now actually have to “touch his stuff” after all these years of swearing I didn’t.

While I’m certainly not ready to part with anything that was his, things like the drying rack full of his in-season hunting clothes really couldn’t stay parked in the middle of the dining room. I’ve been worried that having the constant reminders of him, like his boots on the drying rack next to the door, would keep opening a wound for the kids when they saw them there.

Instead, I’ve realized that certain things, like the boots, just have a place there where they will always belong. Other things will just organically get put away or grown into by the kids and absorbed into their own use. And still other things, like more family photos, will now need to be printed out and framed and added to every room in the house. For me, finding a few old sweatshirts and adding them to my wardrobe is a meaningful way to keep him near me on the worst days, while a few of his old undershirts have already made it into the rag bag.

This precarious balance, of having to live in the past to keep his memory alive, while moving on with our own future, is difficult to maintain, but it’s the only way we can keep his memory alive, and still live ours.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.