photograph/ my mother's wedding day

I have a tattoo on my left arm of my mother. The picture is from her wedding day. The significance of this picture is that it was taken a couple of years before her murder. The picture itself shows her in her wedding gown smiling. The picture doesn't have any color, but her smile lights up the picture and when I look at it it's like the sun is shining indoors. What happened after the wedding and after that picture was taken that my mother is not with me now? The frustration of not knowing the whole story behind her downward spiral pains me and makes me emotionally inconsolable. When something of this magnitude happens and it impacts your life in such a way as it has impacted mine I feel like you should at least know why. All I know is a picture. A picture that depicts a happy bride on a happy day in her life and every time I look at this picture I'm conflicted with emotion. I see it and I smile, I see it and I'm perplexed, I see it and I become upset, because when someone is taken in the manner that my mother was taken you don't imagine a time in the same proximity where they can be as happy and carefree. The wedding and her murder weren't ten years apart, they were within a few years of one another and thats what confuses me. Nevertheless, when I look at my left arm and when I look at her picture I see her smiling at me. I feel her presence and I hear her saying, "it's ok son, live your life and take care of the family", the smile that she flashes in that picture is like armor that I take into this cruel world everyday and it's like a warm embrace I will always be a part of.