On grief, a stepfather’s belongings, a posting calendar that suddenly feels small, and the cool air of fall.
It has been a little over six weeks since Gary, my step-father died, and I am still feeling adrift after loss in a way I did not expect. Back in August I thought the unmoored feeling belonged to the waiting, to those strange days before the funeral, and that once we had gathered and said our goodbyes the ground would come back under my feet. Some of it has. Most days I get up, walk the dogs, answer email, make dinner. And then something small knocks me loose again.
I am sad for myself. I am sad for my siblings and for all of the grandchildren. And I am sad for my mom, who is in Milwaukee while I am here, and that distance has never felt longer than it does right now. After everything she gave while caring for him, I want to be the one who stops by with supper, who sits with her in the evening when the house is too quiet. Instead I call. Then I call again. I feel fiercely protective and completely helpless at the same time, which turns out to be an exhausting combination.
If you are new here, I wrote about Gary in A Life Well Lived, about the days before his funeral in Liminality: The In-Between, and about the young men he taught and mentored in The Inheritance Money Cannot Buy. But there is something else a person leaves behind that nobody puts in an obituary. The stuff.
The Calendar on My Desk
You have probably noticed that the blog has been a little off schedule. Posts go up a day late, or they do not go up at all. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because you would know.
Every morning I open my posting calendar and look at what is lined up. A soup. A dessert. A stack of books for the weekend. And every morning the same question rises up before I can stop it. Does this matter? Does any of it? After a week of sorting through Gary’s things with my mom, a soup recipe feels very small. Some days it is hard to sit down here and sound as though everything is lovely, when what I really am is tired and sad and not entirely sure what the point is.
I don’t have a tidy answer for that. I am telling you anyway, because pretending would be worse.
Sifting Through a Life
Gary was a lot of things. A Navy man, a detective, the man who built a leather company alongside my mother. He also made arrows. He made knives. For years he taught flint knapping on Sugar Island to the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, which is not a sentence most people get to write about their stepfather. He was fascinated by the Civil War and read thousands of books, and I do mean thousands. I could go on and on.
All of it left something behind.
There is an officially signed baseball, because he loved the Brewers and never missed a game. There are the books, shelf after shelf of them. There are the coins he started collecting as a boy and simply never stopped. There are photographs, so many photographs, because Gary took pictures of everything and then, being old school, actually printed them. He framed them, tucked them into albums, and pressed them into people’s hands.
Then there are the things from his travels. A Venus de Milo he bought on our first visit to Paris together. He ordered her at the Louvre, because he loved that statue and wanted to bring her home to enjoy (she is at my house now). And a carved giraffe that stands seven feet tall. Seven feet. He met the artist in Africa, admired the work, and had it shipped home. Who does that? Gary does. Did. I keep tripping over that word.
To a stranger, most of this would look like a jumble. An old baseball, a couple of boxes of coins, a giraffe you have to walk around to get to the desk. You would pick up half of it and wonder why on earth anyone kept it. But everyone who knew him knows exactly why. Each thing comes with a story, and most of them are stories he told us himself, more than once.
That is the hard part. The story does not stay with the object. It stays with the people. So you stand in the middle of a room holding a baseball, trying to decide whether to keep something that matters only because of whose hands it was in before yours.
Then I Came Home and Looked Around
I came home and saw my own house with new eyes, and not in the way the decorating magazines mean.
The books, first. Of course the books. Then my collection of handmade leather boxes, which I cannot walk past in a shop. My quirky little crowd of statues. The brown and white transferware stacked in the cabinets. And the paintings. There are stacks of them, framed and unframed, modern and impressionist and everything in between, leaning against the walls because I have run out of walls.
I wrote an entire post about being a bower bird, about how a collected home is intentional rather than cluttered and every piece has earned its place. I meant it. I still mean it, mostly. But standing in my own living room after a week of sorting Gary’s things, I found myself asking questions I never ask. Why do I have this? Who is going to want it someday? Should I really be buying more?
I don’t know yet. I have not given anything away in the last week. I have not bought anything either, which for me is a small miracle. Mostly I have been standing in doorways, looking.
A Breath of Cool Air
And then there is fall.
Summer is never my season, and this one was long and hot and hard in many ways. I feel as though I have been holding my breath since the worst of the heat, and now, finally, I can let it out. And then breathe in. The mornings are cool and calm, and I stand at the front door a little longer than I need to just to feel the air on my face.
The light has changed. It comes in lower and longer now, and the afternoon shadows fall across the floor in shapes they did not make a month ago. The trees are just beginning to show their color, and every morning I watch the circle out front change a little more. I wrote recently about why fall feels like a fresh start, and fall has always made me happy. This year it feels closer to rescue.
It is a strange thing to hold both at once. Grief in one hand, and in the other a clear, cool morning that makes me glad to be standing in it. I am letting myself have the second one anyway.
What Gary Knew About Photographs
I keep coming back to those printed photographs.
Gary did not print them because he thought they were important. He printed them because he wanted you to have one. His pictures sit in frames on bookshelves and hang on refrigerators under magnets in more houses than I could count, and not one person who received one ever stopped to ask whether a snapshot mattered. It just did. It said, I was there, and I thought of you.
I would never call a bread recipe a legacy. But I think that may be closer to what this little blog is than I have been giving it credit for these past few weeks. Something small, made most mornings, and handed across to you. I am not all the way back to believing that. Some days I am nowhere near it. But I am writing this, and you are reading it, and that seems like a place to start.
As for the stuff, I have no answer yet. Nothing has gone to the donation pile and nothing new has come through the door, but then again I have not been home long enough to make a start. When I figure it out, you will be the first to know.
Have you ever had to sort through the belongings of someone you loved? What did you keep, and was there something that would have looked like nothing to anyone else, but that you simply could not let go of?
I am on Instagram and Pinterest, and I would love to see you there.
I hope that you have a wonderful day. And if you missed Weekend Meanderings yesterday, be sure to visit Kim and Juliet.
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The Inheritance Money Cannot Buy
The Bower Bird Home: How I Decorate and Why I’ll Never Be a Minimalist
