LETTING STUFF GO

RW, blind since birth, photo of a drawing

In high school I read to a blind friend from a book not available in braille or recording, and, when he went off to college, I made a crayon drawing of him. That portrait followed me around until my mother, in a massive deaccession, threw it out with everything I had left behind. Only a year after making that portrait Robert died in a head-on car crash on the infamous L.I.E. Nothing but that drawing to remember him by. I miss it sometimes more than I can bear.

Now I find myself following my mother’s footsteps, de-accessorizing, ridding myself of things that no longer matter. Starting with books, many I could never before part with. And now I can.

Only memories, others’ memories, will outlast me. And the clutter of things would only wear down on those left to deal with them.

But where do you start? (I did with books.)

And how do you overcome the loss of mementos, things you cherished, things that acquired fondness, things that had tiny, personal, idiosyncratic, secretly expansive meanings. None of which that will follow me in my barely visible wake.

I suppose I could re-categorize my stuff as collections, plural because the categories are unrelated: objets d’art simples—Minoan figurine with Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol figures, Montblanc special edition pens, antique dolls, medusa plaque, paper weights, snow globes, Northwest bentwood boxes, letter openers, a tiny Rodin reproduction, paintings, sculptures, toys… Junk in the eyes of others.

So I’ve been a diverse and, maybe, perverse collector. But the eye (my eye) falls on things that delight and inspire me, hold my interest from a perhaps disordered slate of interest, minor passions that stack my home, that create the physical, domestic interiority of my life and created trails on my selections, proof of the means and the space to display them. For me. My private galleries. My personal esthetic shrines. Not for prayer but for simple  sustenance.

And now these are becoming a burden, the albatross come home to roost. It all begins to chastise me for being frivolous. Like the picture of Dorian Gray my things throw their beauties back at me, chastise me for time and effort misspent now that my collections must divorce me, rid me, leave me.

It’s not just that I can’t take them with me. I can’t have them chiding me my final nakedness. I must free myself of the things that will taunt me and weigh me down.

I remember well the adage “naked we came and naked we shall go.” But that speaks only to the physical armature. We come into the world with a vast mantle, an exoskeletal array of imaginings, expectations, longings, plans, forecasts. And we part with an even larger and weightier mantle of remembrances, recollections, memories, reflections, experiences, and relationships. The body departs but the person remains.

I begin to go lighter in the world. I am shedding the things that held me in place but now free me to roam and free me to reconsider who I have been, who I have known, who will remember me. I shift my collector eyes toward new wonderment, to fresh looking, to admiring an empty shelf, to strengthen my personal, enduring, living connections. My lasting, everlasting mantle.