Tell Me a Story: Keepsakes and Other Stuff

I'm brain-fried from all the cleaning, organizing and tossing I’ve been doing lately. Why fried? I’m faced with thousands of painful decisions daily.

I came across a tall stack of The Amazing Bob’s prescription med instructions.

Should I save or toss? Is there any reason to hold onto these? I already know that in the last five years of his life, he was practically buried under a mountain of meds with attendant, stringent instructions. Do I need a reminder of this?

I think not. I’m trying to get past the pain. I want to remember the good, the all fired GREAT things about my man and our 30 years together. Yes, we both had a ton of health struggles BUT what’s important to recall is how we faced them – together and with wry humor.

On emptying the guest room closet, I found TAB’s winter coat and one of his warm sweaters. My man was very tall with arms and legs for miles. I don’t know anyone who these would fit. In my grief, this can't-let-go state should I hold onto them, like beloved old teddy bears or donate to a homeless shelter?

Donate. The painful yet smart choice.

TAB kept a daily calendar. On it he noted special events, doc appointments and other ping-worthy things to remember. Each year he transferred the major deals over to a fresh calendar book. Important shit like, March 10, 1995 Donna flies to Amsterdam. Anniversaries, smallish and large, were carried over from one year to the next.

Yeah, these books are now in a carefully, exhaustively labelled box. He always said he did this, scribbled past events into new calendars, because otherwise he’d lose all track of what happened and when. Yep, same here. In fact, I think I oughta pull out one of those calendar books now and transfer his precisely printed notes to a diary, a list of my own.

And there was more hard sorting of the not-necessarily-TAB variety:

My gone-too-soon friend Sean made me a bunch of mix tapes complete with creative, fun sleeves. Not only do I no longer have a device to play these on, I’m 14 years past being able to actually hear them even if I did have a tape player. Do I keep or toss. Keep.

Keepsake: noun
anything kept, or given to be kept, as a token of friendship or affection; remembrance.

I have a lot of old paintings – my own and Kevin’s. There are ones of mine that I can easily let go of and others I can’t. The paintings in the Keep group – those are either one’s that, in my biased opinion, were successful (I achieved the look/whatever I wanted) OR they were successful AND the subject is someone I want to remember painting.

I have an old painting of my friend Joe Gargery (no, that’s not his name – it’s how my father always referred to him). That’s not a Nazi salute he 's doing – he was tired and leaning on a wall. It makes for a provocative image though, no? I’ve one of TAB happily talking about something fun at a dinner party (where, obvs, world events were bring mega seriously discussed).

I caught moments – Time in a Bottle and shit.