That box in the corner of the closet. The figurine gathering dust on the bookshelf. The file folders of papers from years past, receipts, canceled checks, correspondence, records, old bills, notes to self, figures scribbled on margins indicating paths to decisions made by loved ones long dead.
These are fragments of the remains of a life lived, now over. I’ve let that box sit in one closet in one house, moved to the back of the car, where it sat for at least two months before I could lift it out and carry it into the next house. Where I let the box rest in another closet in an attic storage space for another year. Until I moved again.
Now the box, tattered and stained, because it is the same box my brother filled with my mother’s papers within the week after she died in 2002, that same box sits in my closet of my newest bedroom.
I know what is in there. I know there are papers from the businesses my folks owned. There are a few photographs. Some letters from Alaska, dated from the early 1940’s, when my dad was a fisherman out of Naknek and Dutch Harbor. There are birthday cards signed "Mother" and "Pappy" and "Daddy". There are my letters to my mother, sent to her when I was in college in the 70’s. There are court documents from a lawsuit, criminal negligence testimony surrounding my dad’s death in 1969. There are letters from both of my sisters, now also dead.
Does opening the box and sorting through belongings somehow open the grief again? It’s obvious I haven’t confronted the answer to this question.
Curiously, it’s the lingering scent of my mother’s perfume that startles me the most. I’ve started to open the box...and I stop. I thought I was over this initial phase, five years gone by so fast.
So strange what the wafting of perfume can do to the rest of the brain’s senses.
How do you deal with the remainder of life from your loved ones? Or are you like me. I think I am resisting the end of the sentence that finishes the story.
Previous entries in the series, the Grieving Room
