Getting Stuck With Stuff

Dave and I talked about our stuff. In this blog, stuff will refer to things you own. He was more of a packrat than I am. Going through all his stuff I laughed at some of the things he saved. And we went through a lot of his stuff while he was still alive because I wanted to know why he saved it…why he was attached to it.

After Dave died, the first stuff I got rid of was everything related to cancer. Cancer is a four-letter word in this house and I wanted it all gone. Except there was one thing that was so familiar to me it somehow provided comfort.

Dave had a little green plastic container on our bathroom vanity. It contained his ever-changing manhole covers. If you haven’t read my book, you don’t know about the manhole covers. These are the gauze bandages we configured to cover the hole in his face—where his nose used to be. The bucket also contains a little pair of scissors and some paper flesh-colored tape used to secure the cover to his face. I don’t know if I don’t want to toss these manhole covers because they became such a part of him or it’s because I’m just used to seeing the green bucket on the vanity. When your old life ends with the death of your person, you look for familiarity in your new life.

I really had no problem removing most of Dave’s clothing. Some was donated, some was turned into a wonderful quilt and pillows and a few pieces were kept intact. Most of Dave’s possessions had been streamlined to what he felt was important and was either given away to key people or secured in bins now located under my bed.

But here it is, almost nineteen months since his death, and I refuse to toss the green bucket or to even put it in the closet. I find it bizarre since there wouldn’t have been a green bucket if Dave never had cancer.

There’s some other things I’ve also noticed I don’t want to remove or move.

There’s a small ceramic garbage can next to the toilet in our bathroom. It looks like a sand pail and shovel. It’s meant to be decorative, but could certainly be used as a trash can. It lives next to the toilet to hold Dave’s reading material and a can of bathroom spray. Although Dave, a voracious reader, did most of his reading on his Kindle and online, he still enjoyed a couple of magazines and had a current subscription to Our State when he died. Dave died October 29, 2023 and the October and November 2023 issues of the magazine are still sitting there. For some reason, every time I clean the bathroom I decide it is still not the day to get rid of these magazines.

When Dave and I would travel to UNC for his medical needs, we often stayed one night at a nearby Hyatt Hotel that offered discounts to guests that were in town for treatment at the hospital. For the last couple of decades, hotels have been giving guests those plastic key cards the size of a credit card. I always returned our cards at the end of the stay, but I’ve kept one or two over the years. I thought it might come in handy…for something…someday. Well it never did come in handy, but one of these keycards lives in my car—in the storage area under the radio where you keep your gum and mints and stuff you want handy. Every time I vacuum the car I pull everything out of the small storage area so the vacuum doesn’t suck up the little stuff. And every time, I return the key card back to where it was. Who knows? I might need it someday. I don’t know why I find comfort in it being there. It just feels like it’s been there for so long it’s supposed to be there.

On my refrigerator I have a small whiteboard. I used to use it for menu planning, listing reminders for Dave, or keeping track of his ever-changing medications. One day, after Dave died I wrote a little mantra on it.

ONE

One breath

One moment

One day

One foot in front of the other

It helped me get through the hours when the days felt too long and I didn’t know how I would survive this new life without him. I took a picture of the whiteboard in case it accidentally got smeared, but I still can’t bring myself to wipe it clean. There’s times I’d really like to use it to write something else, but I just can’t bring myself to it. I wonder if one day I’ll just swipe it clean and that will be that.

Although I don’t like a lot of “dust collectors” in my house, most of the items displayed throughout my home have some sentimental value. I find pictures to be most important. Now, in the day of digital photos most of us don’t sit and reminisce over a photo album. We pull out our phone and scroll and scroll looking for that one picture we know we have among thousands.

In my kitchen/dining/living area I have the majority of my displayed photos. There’s one digital photo frame given to us by Dave’s daughter and family as a gift. That frame scrolls with pictures that she adds of her kids and ones I added of Dave and I.

After Dave’s funeral and the memorial service the following day, I invited family and friends back to the house for food and stories of happier times. Most of these people had to travel quite a distance to be here. There were already many pictures in the main part of our house, but I moved many other pictures of Dave into this room for our guests to enjoy. Not including the snapshots on the fridge or the digital frame, I have twenty-five photos in the room. Of that twenty-five, Dave’s face is in eighteen of them. I assumed after the “festivities” I would relocate these photos. I haven’t. I haven’t decided if it’s because they give me comfort or if I’m afraid that it will appear I’m forgetting about him by replacing those pics. And I’m not talking about the appearance to others that I’m forgetting him. I’m talking about how it appears to me. The feeling of moving on is scary and it’s difficult to decide what defines “moving through” and what defines “moving on.”

So for the last nineteen months I’ve decided as long as these things give me some sort of comfort I’ll leave them in place. I found with many other belongings of Dave’s it just took time. Then one day, I decided to move the thing. It took three months to move his laptop off the dining table where he always used it. And yet his phone still lives by the charger, me periodically checking it even though it no longer has service. I charge it up when the battery is low, as if I might miss something if his phone goes dead. Rather strange.

I’d love to hear if any of you have any of these little oddities that give you comfort but just don’t make a lot of sense.