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| Image credit: Photo by crowbert on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
On my wrist is a bright yellow rubber bracelet with LIVESTRONG imprinted on it. I plucked it from a small wicker basket on a table next to a guest book at a memorial service where one of the loved ones spoke about the task of sorting through everything left behind -- the clothes, the music, the souvenirs, the tchochke, the scraps of paper -- and of how each item had meant something to the person who kept and carried them. The meaning they had held was a mystery, forever emptied out of them, and yet the temptation to hold those items, like still fragments of that lost friend, was strong. He spoke of how how he was inspired to value love and live lighter.
Thousands of miles from where I sit now with the bracelet on my wrist, there is a white shingled house with a bedroom that was once mine and remains a shrine to my childhood self. In the bedroom sits a sturdy set of Ethan Allen bookcases painted a soft sunshine yellow, because that was my favorite color when I was three. The top of the bookcases are open shelves; the bottom, cabinets with slatted doors. When I was a preschooler, my family moved to a new city, and one day, while my mother was unpacking boxes, I crawled into the bottom of the one of these bookcases, shut the doors, and fell asleep. My mother spent what must have seemed to her to be frantic hours searching our new home before finding me there, while I have no memory of it at all.
Now too small a space to hold all of me, the cabinets hold (among other things) an old cardboard shoebox filled with odd scraps that formed the butt-ends of my days and ways: a chewed up old pencil, a single crumpled page from a Far Side daily calendar, a bent nail, a quarter and numerous other things I've forgotten. There is also a sheet of notebook paper in the box that explains what each item is and why it is important to me.
Each item was carefully placed in the box and labeled after I spent a summer helping my mother clear out her parents' house. There were shelves and closets full of things. There was an attic and a basement crammed with dusty boxes. There was furniture and photographs. There were old letters and old bank statements and old receipts and piles of Playboy magazine. There was a child's baseball uniform for a grown man already in his grave, old 78 records with nothing to play them on, a doll dressed as Little Red Riding Hood and a round flowered tin full of tobacco. What ought we to keep? What did it all mean: to them or to us or to anyone?
But far from being inspired to live lighter at the time, I was inspired to document, to label a box of detritus so that someone sifting through it could see the meaning in a bent nail and not wonder at it with a sigh. But as I think of that box, of that crumpled paper and bent nail and all the other things I can't recall, I don't remember the meaning they had myself. And that sheet of notebook paper? It's a letter to me. I'm the beneficiary and the executor of my own estate. And I think, the next time I visit that cardboard box, it may be time to honor myself and let go: to learn that lesson of loving strong and living light. Well, except that chewed up pencil. I might not be quite ready to part with that yet.
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