My partner died over a year ago and I seem to be moving at snail’s pace I can’t bring myself to move anything that belonged to her or even clean out the closets and drawers in our bedroom.
I understand. My hubs died 3 years ago Christmas Eve.’ His hairbrush is still on the sink edge. I wrote the following the week of what would have been his 68th birthday just a few months after he died. I think you’ will understand.
“I had Bill’s clothes folded and placed neatly in a few laundry baskets and put out of the way That meant I did not have to really regard them except when I made a mental note to get them to the Salvation Army. But there was hamper by the bed that I had not dealt with. The clothes in it were clean but they had been there since Bill’s came home from his first hospital stay. So they had just been tossed there to get them out of the way.
The hamper was not full and I had to reach down to gather a couple of shirts, a pajama bottom, a pair of shorts, so ordinary and I was getting on with it just fine. Until I came across his blue jeans. Faded, scuffed up hem. worn out pocket, always sliding down his skinny ass, blue jeans. And I sobbed.
It was not the sobbing of sentimentality. It was a sobbing for the wrongness of an empty pair of blue jeans which in the right order of the universe belonged on my husband. Jeans that could be kicked off at the end of the day and left on the floor, because the hamper would be there in the morning or next laundry day or someone else picked them up. Jeans stiff from the line pulled over legs and ass still damp from the shower. Jeans he wore the last night he was home with me. His jeans.
But the universe went wrong and now they were just a pair of jeans that somebody else could use. So they got folded and boxed along with the rest. I don’t need them for memories. But most of all I don’t need their emptiness. I have enough of that now.”
That’s pretty common, I think. Three years after her death, my wife’s clothes are still hanging in the closet.