Requiem for a Life, Through Artifacts

My husband sold his boat earlier this year, and I discovered that three boxes of my ancient belongings had survived in the storage unit where he kept his boat. When we vacated the storage unit, these boxes returned to our house.

About fifteen years ago, my husband deposited these boxes, along with about thirty other boxes, in an earlier storage unit he rented. That unit suffered water damage some seven or eight years ago. At that point, most of the boxes had to be thrown out, but somehow, these three boxes survived and moved to where he kept his boat.

There was no rationality to what survived, and even some of these items were mildewy and nasty. It appeared that when I dealt with the water damage, I threw whatever looked salvageable into a box that could still support the full weight of the contents. These three boxes were the result. The remaining artifacts dated back to my childhood and continued through my kids’ high school years.

Among the things I discovered (in rough order chronologically) were

• The first thing I ever embroidered, done when I was about ten years old (an apron with a cat on it)
• Some English assignments (poems and booklets) I did in the seventh and eighth grades
• The letters I sent and received on the People-to-People program I went on when I was fifteen, along with the travel journal I kept
• My high school graduation cap and gown, and a few miscellaneous high school event programs
• Correspondence from family and friends throughout my undergraduate and law school years (this looked pretty complete)
• Cards that came with wedding presents from our wedding in November 1977
• The travel journal I kept when my husband and I went to London in August 1979
• Extra copies of the appellate briefs I’d written as an attorney, which I’d kept in case I ever needed writing samples
• A couple of handmade cards my young daughter drew for me
• My son’s report cards and papers from his middle school and early high-school years
• The congratulatory notes colleagues sent me when I moved from the Hallmark Legal Department into a Human Resources position

As I sorted through this detritus of my past, I remembered many of the events that gave rise to the documents. If I’d taken the time to read everything carefully, I could have reconstructed my life week by week between 1973 and 1979, along with many events in earlier and later years. Some of the memories were clear, some were hazy, but I felt again the angst of high school, the independence of college, the joy of new love and marriage, the fears of a young professional, and the worries of a new mother.

What to keep? What to toss? There was not much more rationality in my decisions than in what had survived the water damage. I thought of taking pictures of everything, if only to preserve the memories. But to be frank, if I hadn’t thought about these events in the fifteen years since the artifacts went into storage, did I need to think about them again in the future?

So almost everything went into the trash or recycling. All my mother’s letters. All my friends’ letters. I kept the letters from my fiance (now husband). I kept the things my kids made for me. But not much else. The stuff I kept didn’t even fill one box—less than a quarter of the volume of what I’d found.

It’s hard to give up memories. (see here, here, and here) As I went through the boxes, I mourned every item I put in the trash and recycling piles. I mourned my inability to take the time to read each piece thoroughly. I mourned the knowledge that some of these memories would never resurface again without the prompt of these artifacts.

As the recycling truck dumped my full bin on trash day, I wanted to shout “Stop! That’s my life you’re throwing away.” Melodramatic, admittedly, but that’s how I felt.

I need to start preparing for our next move, which will require far more downsizing than our move four years ago. I will have to give up a lot more treasures. A lot more memories. These past week was just the first stage. I will have to develop a tougher skin, a more philosophical approach to the past. I will have to face the future full on.

How do you decide what to keep and what to throw away? And how do you feel when you make these decisions?