I packed your shirts away today.
Mom gave them to me after you were gone, too soon, along with a couple of your books, your wallet with those scraps of paper in them recording every pill, every date. They all need to go to the backs of other people, except this one, this black and white one that I remember so well, your Brylcreemed pompadour on top, the black knit dickey underneath. The lime green one will be perfect for someone next St. Patrick's Day; maybe they'll put it on a mannequin in the window at the thrift shop. They'll all get another life, except this one, this special one. I'll tuck that away in a cedar chest with everything else, to remember.
I packed your shirts away today.
They've been in that closet forever, years upon years, sitting in dresser drawers along with your Eagle scout memorabilia, the school treasures, the letters home, things your dad didn't have the heart to part with, still doesn't. He and your mom finally poured a couple of glasses of wine, sat down by the fireplace and burned the suit you were in that last night, the summer after you graduated, when you left too soon trying to get back to them on a road in Michigan, little boy blue. Your dad still can't part with them, so they're nicely packed and tucked away, in that quiet place where the love still lives.
I packed your shirts away today.
We told you we'd keep your room as you left it, and we did, that you'd always have a home with us. Your uncle imagined Cosette coming to live with us in Les Miserables and I saw Patrick coming to live with Auntie Mame, while you leaned more toward being Harry Potter under the stairs, taken suddenly to a different home, a different place. There was love enough for all of us and plenty more, but in the end you had to leave us and the shirts stayed. They've been hanging there since, aching for new life, and finally they'll get one, on the back of some other little girl who can't afford a uniform to go to school and won't know anything about the little girl who wore it first, who's now sixteen and far far away, a fading memory, a distant dream.
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Ted Frier
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It was irrational, but I didn't know how to face the pain.
Rated for Truth.
This was wonderful.
rated with hugs and tears
Rated.
It is one of the hardest things, the sorting that must be done. After.
The shirts being packed away were packed away in three different decades--the 80's, the 90's, and now. The first are shirts my mother gave me that were my dad's, sent to me in Wisconsin in the early 80's and later donated to the Salvation Army, except for one. I did see the lime green one displayed on a mannequin in the window the next week just in time for St. Patrick's Day.
The next were my husband's son John's shirts, which are in a closet in our home up north; he died in a car accident 13 years before we were married, a few months after he graduated from college. My husband and his first wife (who passed away three years before we were married from breast cancer) burned the suit he was in when he was killed a few months after his untimely death.
The third are our niece's school uniform shirts which she had when she lived with us for 7th grade, which we donated to the school uniform exchange. I decided to put them all together into one post about packing away shirts, and memories, from three different lives, three different losses. The first two were death, and the third a different type of loss, all an ache in the heart, and shirts that have gone on to other lives.
If you don't mind, it reminds me of a recent experience with my daughter, who's deceased father in law, had a whole wardrobe of shirts left in the house she lives in, to deal with. Her mother in law couldn't bear to get rid of all his things and the shirts simply hung in the guest closet...the room that was to become her son's. She and I looked at the yellowing white shirts, for a few seconds and tossed them. Purging is healing. Wonderful post, Kathy.
rated
But isn't this what life is - a stream of taking in and letting go -
And then a new life - always a new life
I guess that's enough but I'm a follower of Siddha Yoga and Gurumayi once said, "make a friend of death." I've also read a book by Adidam Samraj called "Easy Death" which speaks of that moment as one of those spiritual we have. Another book, The Urantia Book, speaks of The Mansion Worlds as a place we arrive at after dying, a place that is neither Heaven nor the world we live in now.
Mom was 89 but I would have loved to see her become 90.
This is a beautiful post -- the post itself, because it really doesn't matter much whether you packed the shirts away, or left them dangling in the closet. The main thing is having gathered these three losses into one place. The shirts are such a palpable symbol of emptiness. And you obviously triggered a lot from everyone here.
Me too. In my mind I went straight to folding laundry, working through my son's Star Wars t-shirts. They're so small. And I am desperately grateful that he is here, to outgrow them.
Thanks for a beautiful post.
The Gene Autry Museum in LA has the shirt from that poignant final scene in "Brokeback Mountain", part of a piece about gay cowboys in the old West. Thi sreminds me I have to go see it.
A lot to contemplate.
R
What a moving and eloquent piece of writing! Amazing......