Beyond His Clutter

Oh my goodness I can so identify with the story that I am sharing with you today.

 

It's a story titled, 54 Drawers, and it's about a daughter who thoughtfully and lovingly is going through the drawers and drawers of file cabinets containing huge amounts of paper her recently deceased father stored in the office of his house.

 

In my case it was and still is the papers that my late husband left in his office.  Over the years, I have made a lot of progress and thrown out lots and lots of boxes containing everything from old bills, old checkbooks, handwritten notes, pictures, and receipts to zillions of stories printed from websites along with multiple copies of stories my husband beautifully wrote while working as a prize-winning science and space reporter for The Washington Post.

Thomas O'Toole hard at work at his Washington Post desk

If you have never found yourself in the position of going through a deceased person's belongings please let me tell you that it is not the kind of activity that happens quickly.  No way.  It is dicey territory.  Don't let anyone tell you that it is the same as when you say you are going to clean out your closet, desk or any other room in your house.

 

It takes time, especially if the things belong to someone you cared about.  It is an unpredictable, emotional and even intimate journey, just as Olivia Judson so eloquently writes in her story, 54 Drawers,  recently published in The New York Times.  For those of you readers who have found yourself in the situation of going through someone else's belongings after their death, I hope you agree with me that initially you think you are ready for the task and that it shouldn't be too difficult.

For me, it quickly became evident upon going through the first box that it was going to be harder than I thought.  His things took me back to him and I was back inside my husband's head reading his written thoughts, completed or not, and some pieces of paper were out of the blue surprising, revealing some things about himself that we had not ever discussed.  He may have even forgotten that he wrote these thoughts.  I'm not implying that I uncovered any deep dark secrets but just that I came upon things that he wrote in the emotion of a moment and may have wanted to keep private.

Throwing away some of some husband's stuff felt like I was disrespecting him even when it was just an outdated piece of paper or a report that was not of any importance.  I knew that I wasn't doing anything of the sort but it certainly felt that way.  Then there were other times when going through his stuff felt like a game.  I would read whatever it was I had found and stare at it for awhile wondering why he had kept it in the first place.

" Is there something of importance here that I'm missing?" I would ask myself.

And then I realized that the answer to that question was yes.  I was missing him.

Please read Olivia Judson's story, 54 Drawers, by clicking on the link below: 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/54-drawers/

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!