It's my lunch hour and I drive to the house. There are things to pull from that house and push into mine, things that are dusted with, no saturated with their lives, my memories, and also my sadness. I think I'm numb but know I'm not if I can still identify what I feel. Each time I get into my car to go there or leave there, I pause and feel the swelling and the tightness.
Walking through the hallway to their bedroom, my brother tells me he's taken my father's things to the Open Door Mission. It's what we both wanted, what my father would have wanted, what my mother would not let us do after my father died. I think sometimes she was hoping he'd come back, hoping and convincing herself that indeed he was on an extremely successful fishing trip and was just late. Very late. And not only would he be disappointed but also terribly surprised if we'd removed his things from his closet. If he came home, he'd need his clothes. It turns over on itself. Somehow in her mind, if the clothes were gone, then he would not be able to come home.
When is your father coming home?
After a while, I started telling the truth: He's gone mom, Dad is gone. He is not coming home.
No, he's late, she'd assure me. Her brow would furrow, she'd pause, sigh, look to the floor and say, but it's not like him to be gone this long without calling.
Those three lines a thousand times the past two years. Who can blame her for her hope? I cannot. And as she began to worry, so would I, because hope is more powerful than knowledge.
I walk into his closet and finally, completely, realize he is not late. The space is empty, save for a few hangers, shoe trees, a vacant laundry basket. I look at the poles where his suits once hung, the pole where he would place his ties. I look at this shelves that held his shoes, the space that was his, this empty space that with the absence of his clothes in turn loses the echo of his presence. It becomes a closet, period.
It looks like my heart. A shock of absence, save for a few hangers.
4 comments:
Alison, I know this is such an emotional time for you and your brother. All I can say is, it WILL get better.
It isn't easy, is it? It was nearly a year after my sister's husband died, before we could go through his clothes. And it was so painful. So final. My good thoughts are with you.
Most of us, the first time we face the responsibility you and Carl are facing, have no experience with this kind of task, no familiarity with the feelings it evokes. It makes one feel profoundly aware of being a grown-up while wanting only to be a child for a little while longer.
When I think about you looking into that empty closet, I picture your father standing right beside you, his big hand on your shoulder. Can you almost feel him there?
Velvet - You are one of only a few who can make that comment to me here. I thank you for it, for reminding me of his hands. The memory is comforting, very comforting. Ah, the magic of that man's hands. Sigh. :-)
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