Not On A Pedestal

 

 

 

 

I wrote a post in June about my "paper chase" through boxes of memos, computer printouts, handwritten notes and personal writings that belonged to my husband who died eight years ago.  As I previously mentioned, after all these years, there are still lots of boxes sitting around waiting for my attention and this past weekend I found the time to go through another box.

 

You can choose to go through all of a loved one's papers yourself or you can do what a friend of mind did when his wife died: he paid someone to come to his house, box up his wife's belongings and take them out of the house to donate to others in need.  It was just too painful for my friend and he chose to make a clean break of it by having someone else move everything out.

 

I could follow my friend's example but I am too afraid I will miss something valuable.  Not necessarily something that's worth a lot of money, but something that's worth a lot to my heart.

 

I'm not sure what value I would put on this particular box.  At first it seemed worthless, full of things I could easily throw away, and then I came upon a very old interoffice work email that my husband had printed out.  My husband was a very busy man who wrote about serious issues and serious stories of the day. He had a great sense of humor, yet after reading a large amount of his work emails, it amazes me the ridiculous stuff he and some of his male colleagues would email each other about.  

 

With a subject line of "The 5 Toughest Questions Women Ask," this particular work email talked about an article in something called Sassy magazine; which I'm not even sure ever existed.  The email said that the five toughest questions women ask men are the following:

--Do you love me?
--What are you thinking?
--Do I look fat?
--Do you think she is prettier than me?
--What would you do if I died?

Basically, the email was silly and had an old boy piggy tone to it.  The questions and their accompanying answers continued with the theme that some women should be seen and not heard.  I'm sure in his own way my husband thought this was funny or maybe he thought the person who sent it to him was funny but the humor of it escaped me.  If he were alive, my husband probably would have handed to me and asked me what I thought of it.  I'm sure I would have rolled my eyes and said, "Not much."

 

This little exercise reminded me not to make my husband out to be a saint.  Not that I had made him out to be a saint, but sometimes with the passage of  time you forget the nuances and some of the things a person used to do.  This exercise also is making me see my stuff in a new light.

Just as we all do, my husband said and did things that were sometimes annoying and sometimes politically incorrect but I loved him anyway.  I think this is one of the reasons why only people who were emotionally close to the deceased person should go through their belongings.  They knew the whole person and really and truly understand the context of what the loved one left behind.
 

My Paper Chase

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I've started going through a number of boxes of papers that once belonged to my husband. 

For those of you who have gone through the belongings of a spouse, friend or relative after they died, you know this is not a straightforward process.  Each of these boxes is potentially an emotional minefield because I don't know what's contained in them.  He filled them up and now they are waiting for my attention. 

You might be thinking, "It's just old papers.  What's the big deal?"  Since my husband was a reporter/writer/editor, these papers aren't the same kind of papers you might let pile up on your dining room table and then throw into a box.   I need to read the papers before I decide to throw them away.  These papers could be old stories he wrote or memos he wrote or ideas he jotted down on the fly.  

I'm sure it sounds rather lazy of me that I have let these boxes hang around for eight years and I have yet to go through them.  In a perfect world, I would have already sifted through all of the papers, tossed the ones that don't mean anything and read the ones that mean something and either filed them away or given them to a family member.

But, this being an entirely imperfect world, some of the boxes have been in a closet and some have been under a table in my home office.  I have attempted to go through them many times before but I would always come upon something frustrating g and then had to stop.  Sometimes I would open the boxes up just to remind myself what kind of stuff was inside.  If the papers on top were computer printout of stories from websites or printouts or newspapers from years ago, then I made a lot of progress and started throwing things away.

The hangups usually start when I find bev naps (short for beverage napkins in restaurant speak) with his hand writing on them and I start to read them or just stare at his handwriting or try to figure out why he wrote what he wrote.  Or I find a work email he printed out that is a record of a particularly funny incident or a particularly annoying disagreement he was having with a colleague.

Some of these papers are priceless and some of them are oh-so-painful.

I can hear his voice in my head as I read some of the notes and I have responded to him by saying, "Why did you leave all of this here for me to clean up?  I really don't know what to do with it.  I wish you had thrown it away when you had the chance."

And then, just as I am exasperated by the whole tedious process of it, I'll discover a real nugget of information that I have never seen before and can't wait to share with his children: a yellowed and wrinkled page from the December 8, 1967 Congressional Record showing that one of his stories was inserted by a senator.

I didn't see that one coming at all!