Sifting through artifacts

Previously unimportant objects take on new significance when someone dies. Death means there's a limited supply of artifacts: there will be no more receipts or to-do lists, photos or paychecks, jewelry, postcards, T-shirts, strands of hair, mugs, or anything else that the person created or touched. The feeling of scarcity makes the task of sorting — or even of going about routine tasks like recycling an empty shampoo bottle — incredibly difficult.

As I went through Sandy's things in the first weeks after her death, I felt compelled to keep every bit of paper on which she'd scribbled, anything she'd stashed in a drawer, almost everything she'd touched. The decision to throw something away or recycle it required a much higher level of commitment than it would have if she and I had just been cleaning out a room together.

But not letting go of anything lessens the importance of the truly meaningful bits. So the challenge I found was in paying attention to what meant something to Sandy: what she'd have kept, what she'd have shared, what she'd have thrown away.

I'm still working on it. The easiest part was identifying things that must be kept (her favorite clothes that also fit me, the dress she wore the night we got together, photographs of her, letters and cards we gave each other, etc) or that needed to go to people who love her (favorite clothes that I won't wear, cards and letters from them, family mementos, etc.). I also found it relatively easy to get rid of things I knew she loathed, or of clothing that she never wore.

It's the in-between things, the things that have meaning now only because she touched them, that are the hardest. I've set most of them aside for now, to deal with at a time that the feeling of scarcity has receded. I'm assuming that time will come.

The evening before we were in that Whole Foods parking
lot, we had dinner with Cassandra and Steve. The delightful
thing about artifacts is that they open up a cascade of vivid
memories - far more than you might think a simple movie
ticket or grocery store receipt could inspire.

Meanwhile, there are the surprising artifacts that delight me every time I discover them. Receipts, shopping lists, and to-do lists are much more poignant now because they catalog moments in our life together. I put my hand in the pocket of my rainjacket a couple of days ago and came out with a handful of receipts. Movie ticket stubs: Inception at Pacific Place in November 2010, RoboCop at Central Cinema last spring. A Whole Foods receipt from San Jose, California last May, when we were stocking up on supplies for our two-day journey home at the end of our vacation; just seeing that receipt, I'm there again, as we debated whether to buy dried apple rings, rearranged the car's contents in the parking lot, plotted our route home.

I'll come across a to-do list, and remember her doing those tasks or us doing them together — or one or both of us feeling guilty about not getting them done. What's on the list tells me what year or sometimes even week or day it was written. Shopping lists and weekly menu plans take me to the week in question, especially when they're scribbled with notes about what we were each planning to do each night — meetings, getting together with friends, working late, volunteering somewhere. These tiny little time capsules thrill me. For now, they go back in a pile or a jacket pocket where I'll get to discover and enjoy them again later.