As you might imagine, I’m still engaged in the task of closing down my ex’s place and most days I’m spending many hours at it. I’ve hired someone to help with the hauling and distribution, but that person can’t really make the decisions. My brother and sister-in-law came up for two days and they helped me too, although again I’m the one who has to make the decisions.
This is extra hard because my ex and I didn’t live together, and because he was very much a saver. He never wanted anyone else to throw out any of his things, including me, so it feels like I’m going against his wishes. But of course it must be done. And he really, really, wanted to do it; he just ran out of steam the last few years.
And so it is left to me. It’s an extraordinarily large task, and I can’t postpone it because I have very very little storage space where I live.
What am I finding? Tons and tons of things, many of which have a deep and touching emotional resonance for me. And just being in his place without him being there too is jarring and sad.
A hundred or more maps, conjuring up the pre-GPS times when road trips meant me sitting in the passenger seat trying to decipher a map and give directions.
Cards and cards and cards, some from my mother to me (none of which I remember). They are touching, but I read them once and then toss them.
One undeposited check from his father, from decades ago.
An indescribable number of bills and bank statements and credit cards and driver’s licenses and passports going back nearly fifty years. Many are mine; I had no idea he saved them.
My 50th high school reunion name tag. I didn’t save it; he did.
Playbills and tickets. Notes from old girlfriends, some very emotional. Notes I left for him, completely practical and pedestrian such as, “I think I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning.”
Letters he wrote to his parents in the mid-60s when he spent many months in Europe. The one I read complained about the French food (!), but he was living at a student hostel where dinner cost thirty cents. It was mostly potatoes.
User manuals for cameras and projectors that go back a half century. The cameras and projectors that go with them.
Clever things he wrote: song lyrics, and an invite to our dog’s 15th birthday party that was very amusing.
I saved a few things – for example, the dog party letter. But the rest go in the dumpster or the recycle bin. Tossing them feels a little like tossing the very young man I first knew, the medium-young man of our marriage, the older man he became as his handwriting dimmed due to Parkinson’s. I have to steel myself to just do it because there’s no saving most of these things. He couldn’t stop time and neither can I.
[NOTE: I didn’t have to do any of this when Gerard died. His younger brother stayed in his apartment for about two months, taking on the task. All I did was walk in for about an hour and take a couple of mementos. Gerard had lost virtually everything in the Paradise fire, but a little over four years had passed and he’d amassed a fair amount of stuff, although nothing even remotely approaching the lifetime collection of my ex. And yet it still took his brother about two months to accomplish closing the place down.]
