More to Come
It has started. At first it was a trickle. Now, its more or less a steady stream. The clothes of my departed wife are leaving. Hardly of their own volition, of course. My daughter took some, a few things at first, a big handful this weekend. My wife’s girlfriends, who came this past Saturday, spent time in the closest, talking and remembering their friend while trying on blouses and selecting ones to join their wardrobes. Yesterday, I took two arm loads of jeans and pants to a local church.
There is still more to go, however, and I am trying to find good homes for them. There are boxes of shoes, and coats, and formal dresses, the attire that carried her through DAR and corporate functions. Last year, in the Scent of the Soul, I wrote about the force of a person’s life trailing behind them and leaving “an energy signature…, a chimera, a trace of the interaction between the person and space and time.” These clothes are a physical manifestation of that. Little bits of her that will drift out into the universe, some to be remembered, some not.
It’s a fate that awaits all of us. We exist. We die. We leave things behind. Memories, bits of clothing, a book or two, maybe a guitar. They pass one to another along with our memories, then those who knew us die, and we become names on bits of paper and stone, until finally, the world looks down and there is barely a flicker of recognition. We are discarded jeans in an old pile of clothes. Dust on a picture frame. A bit of DNA in a baby. Its an odd sort of equality. Oblivion. I barely know what to make of it except that while I miss my wife there is still a great deal of living to which I need to attend.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale