Memories Dis-Assembled - An Essay on Handling Your Dead Spouses Possessions
How do you disassemble a life time's worth of memories and possessions? How do you climb a cliff with no ropes and no nets, when you are already badly injured?
Here I sit, in the middle of my bathroom floor amongst all of our collected bathroom stuff. I need to sort it out, and throw a lot away because it won't fit in the smaller bathroom of the home I've moved to since my husband died. Some things are easy decisions: keep, garbage or donate. But then, I got to the box with his personal things and the small travel bag he took with him on the day he died. What does a nail clipper mean? To most, it means nothing, but in this context it was actually one of his most personal possessions that he had taken with him and used for 30 years as a travelling salesman. How can I throw that away? What of the new ab-fab razor he had just gotten that he crowed about as really a great new thing? There is an almost new deodorant that I know he only used twice. But I sniff, and it does not smell of him - just a slight perfumed scent that I had become so very used to. This is the crux of the delima: I cannot give it away - it is used!; I cannot throw it away - it was his...; and it seems so useless to keep it. Our cat sleeps in the middle of the ruins of what used to be our life.
Steven used to say that that "Opportunity" was a funny looking man with lots of hair on the front of his head and bald in the back. If you approached him, you could grab hold of your opportunity, but if he passed you by and you had second thoughts, it was too late. I wonder what he would have said about my current situation?
The Widow Eve
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