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.
You Might Also Enjoy
The Inheritance Money Cannot Buy
The Bower Bird Home: How I Decorate and Why I’ll Never Be a Minimalist
I kept my Mom’s cut glass fruit bowls; I am still not exactly sure why. Kansas jello, maybe. And, I kept my Grandmother’s sewing box and rolling pin, and recipe box with recipes in her handwriting, things so closely related to my memories of her.
Kelly,
I love the items that you kept from your mother and grandmother. I am sentimental like that as well, the things I kept only mean something to me.
Thank you for sharing.
When my mom passed away my sister and I cleaned the house and between the four siblings, we divided up things we loved, wanted or needed. Then came the estate sale. I remember the hardest thing to see go (for which none of us had the room) was my mom’s beloved piano. What started as a difficult loss ended quite happily as a young family was absolutely THRILLED to get a great piano. Perhaps this thought may help you in the future while making difficult decisions to know your treasures will thrill the new owners. Peace.
I understand your unmoored feelings. Death of a parent moves you up the ladder and you feel your mortality more acutely I think.
I adopted a way of looking at the disposal of family estate belongings. Just because someone chose to have something in their life didn’t mean I had to have it in mine. It set me free to keep only what I really valued or would get a good feeling out of having. It let me cut ties with my responsibility of the item.
I’m sorry for your family’s loss. It sounds like Gary was well loved and who could ask for more than that.
Stay steady.
Gary sounds like a wonderful well loved and respected man. I am sorry for your loss
I became the repository for an aunts and second cousins beloved belongings. I did not know them in their youth but a picture evolved as I went through their “life”. All items were eventually offered to family members. I kept some art and foreign items collected from travel. The hardest thing to know what to do with are photographs neatly arranged depicting armed service and college years. I know no one in the pictures. Any suggestions are welcome. And how right you are that you look at your own things differently.
Gary would be loving post season Brewers baseball right now!
My mother had a pink glass bowl I always wanted and finally took home after she passed. My brother still tells me he wants it (it has become our family joke) – it’s special fun. It’s not the stuff it’s the memory.
Elizabeth, I am so sorry for your loss. Unmoored is the perfect word to describe the feeling.
When my brother died, I kept his license plate (we owned a car dealership and all had similar plates) and a t shirt and hat of his.
When my son died, I kept his Ruth Chris waiter’s uniform, his set of classic books, and his laptop inside its’ case, made to look like an old book – the perfect interpretation of his personality. And of course ashes and a lock of his hair. I sent his flannel shirts to all his female friends.
When my dad died, I didn’t keep anything specific. We moved his boat models to our river house and they greet us when we are there. Just being there is like being with him, so that is enough.
Large size stainless steel mixing bowls that I use weekly, a cedar chest that I love that when I was married I had asked a neighbor friend if he could refinish it…he then looked at that cedar chest and asked me who my grandmother was…come to find out my neighbor’s dad dated my grandmother and refinished this same piece years ago…small world huh?!….
I have a cotton sweatshirt zip up jacket that my dad wore and I took home with me after he passed..I wear it often and it’s the only thing that calms my Cavalier and he naps on it daily when I take it off.
The Fiesta Ware glass tumblers I received in the mail the day after my grandmother passed..I was totally surprised.
It’s so wonderful that Gary left you with many of his precious things. Take care Elizabeth. Go visit mom when you can. Life is short:0)
My husband passed away three+ years ago. I first let the kids, SILs and grandkids pick things that were precious to them. I kept his Cubs baseballs, driver’s license, notebooks, and the little precious items he treasured. Much of his clothing went to Goodwill. I did keep a pair of jeans, a couple of t-shirts, a blue sweater that he looked so handsome in, his chemo caps, his wild swim trunks. His chemo caps hold his smell, and I press them close when the missing him becomes too hard to bear.
What you are experiencing is so normal-a part of life. It’s just so hard. Especially since you are such a distance from your mom. Being far away you get busy with your own routine and then some small thing triggers it and it hits like a huge wave. Like many of us, I’ve been through this more times than I care to count. Let that wave wash over you and know you honor his memory with your grief. In my experience the grief doesn’t really go away but you learn to live with it. And you will grow with it and maybe find a positive use for the experience, like being more able to help others when their turn comes. If you can, don’t give away too much yet. It’s pretty raw still and I hope you’ll give yourself grace and be patient with yourself. Try to not make too many quick decisions if you can help it. Time will help you sort that out. And sometimes taking it a day at a time isn’t enough. Sometimes it’s the next few minutes. Somewhere along the way you’ll find yourself thinking Oh Gary would love it if I did so-and-so and you will smile, maybe with tears, maybe not. Just don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s ok to share and definitely part of the grieving/healing process. You’ve got this.
Sorry so long-
Thank you! I know that I am walking the same path that so many before me have and will after and I also realize that this is the first loss of one of my parents, I do not even want to think about loosing the others. Loosing someone that we love human or furry is never easy, we love them.
I do have waves of sorry and laughter and sometimes both at the same time. I also “talk” to Gary and my mother in law, while out on my walks in the morning. Strange to some but it is a balm to my soul as I tell them about my day and all about the things I miss and love about them.
I am trying not to make too many decisions and trying to keep one of my siblings from making too many for my mom. Like selling her house.
I hope that sharing my feeligns, ups and downs here will help others share their own. We are all on the path of life and sometimes sharing with strangers who are friends on the internet is helpful.
Have a wondferul day and thank you for sharing your wisdom.
Yes I have sorted through both my mom’s when she died at age 64 and I was 38 and my dad’s when he was nearly 99 and I was 68. I kept things that I always loved or reminded me of them. My 2 sisters and I sorted through all the family albums two years ago and kept what we each wanted and tossed the rest. Now I’m faced with the task of moving into a smaller home. I recently realized I don’t have enough wall space to hang all the art I have, or bookcases to display my objects and books. So now I’m sorting and donating or selling things. I don’t have children so there’s no one to pass along my things.
An article I read said to ask these three questions and if the answer is no to each then let it go. Do I honestly need it? Do I really use it? Do I truly love it?
Elizabeth, my advice would not make rash decisions this first year after his death. Box up the things you can’t decide about and revisit them in a year. The grief is still raw and at the surface and that can change how we make decisions. Your blog is meaningful and a spot of comfort to many but you can also cut back if that helps you mentally. We would understand. Most of all care for your tender heart but don’t discount what you do or contribute to us.
Nanci, thank you for your sound advice. You are right, the grief is raw, so raw in fact that there are days when I talk to my mother she cannot remember conversations that we had the week of the funeral or even last week. She said that she is tired, as she should be, the life of a caretaker is difficult.
As for your downsizing, do you have any neices, nephews of children of friends that might like some of your things? I do not envy your task of downsizing. I have done it 2 times in the last 15 years and once in awhile I think of something I am sad that I gave away.
I hope that you fill your new space with all of the things that you love, and that bring you joy and comfort.
Oh, there are simply no words for our grief when a beloved parent or spouse or friend or, child leaves our world for the next.
I kept a pair of my husband’s shoes?? I’m still not sure why…. he was a physician and the miles he walked….in hospital halls….between hospital beds…..walks with children and grandchildren….and many dogs…..?
I kept other things, but his shoes….still have one pair …. It’s been 20 years.
Take care of yourself. Don’t rush your grief.
Maureen, I love the idea that you kept a pair of his shoes. As you mentioned, he walked miles and miles in thos shoes caring for patients, with his children and grandchildren and beloved pets, as well as all of the times he walked along side of you. Many memories in the soles of those shoes.
Thank you for your kindness.
The feelings will come and go, I’m sure you already know. Gary sounds like a man of the world, he must have recounted some wonderful stories.
After my father passed, my mum and sister renovated the old bathroom (mum’s house was built in 1918) i took the mirrored door from the wall cabinet dad used to shave. I have it sitting in my room on a shelf and wonder how I should display it. I think I will hang it on my bedroom wall with a beautiful old chain to hold it.
Rita, thank you! I will remember our adventures and his stories for the rest of my life and share them as well.
I love the idea of hanging the mirror from your family wall cabinet in your bedroom. How wonderful to have a piece of your family histoty in your own home. Can you even imagine hoe many times your father looked into that missor and shaved over his lifetime. It makes me smile thinking about it and I didn’t even know him.
I picture him looking back at you!
Have a wonderful day friend.
Dear Elizabeth,
I more than understand loss and feeling unmoored. Loss of a deeply loved one never goes away. You give yourself Grace and Peace. Gary sounds like one of a kind, the best kind. Memories run through us deeply.
My papa purchased a beautiful elephant at an antique store. I think in memory of his mother. He will never forget like elephants do. He never recovered from her passing. This runs in our family. I get you, standing sincere warm caring hugs.
Katherine, thank you for your always kind words. I love the idea of a beautiful elephant! They never forget and neither will we.
xo
“God gave us memories so we can gather flowers in the winter.”
A beautiful quote. Thank you for sharing.
I love reading your posts. You write so beautifully!
Sandy, thank you. That is so kind of you to say.
Have a lovely day.
My dad died several years ago. My coworkers were so loving and sympathetic, but after a week or so I’m sure they thought my life had returned to normal. And it had at work, at church, out with friends, etc. What they didn’t realize, and took me by surprise, was that when I returned home everyday I got nothing accomplished. For months I functioned normally all day long, and then came home and sat and stared out the window for hours on end. We have a lovely view, and I processed Dad’s death quietly watching birds fly by and seeing the breeze ruffle the leaves on the trees. I hope this thought helps you.
KAthie,
Thank you! I appreciate you sharing your grief story. Grief is a “funny thing” if you are mired in it, you have to go on, as life does, and those around us are sometimes uncomfortable so their threshold of mouring is 2-4 weeks and then there is the assumption that we are better.
There are days I do exactly that or some days I spend the entire day rewatching the same Chinese yourtube series I have wated 10 times and have no idea what they are saying but occassionally read the subtitles. Sometimes I just want to knumb my mind and not think of anything.
Thank you again, it helps tremendously.