I came home from Sunday service to find six black contractor bags at my curb on Elm Street. My daughter Paula had spent the morning “decluttering” the back bedroom – the room where my husband Ellis’s things had sat untouched since he died in March of 2021. “You weren’t ever going to do it, Mom,” she said, drying her hands on a dish towel. “It’s just stuff.” The truck was coming at seven. I did not shout. I set my purse on the porch step, walked to the curb in my church coat, and knelt down on the concrete to open the third bag – the heavy one.
Inside was Ellis’s footlocker from the county, with his name still stenciled on the lid. And inside that, under his climbing spurs and his hard hat, was a shoebox I had never seen. It held every card I ever gave him. Forty-one birthdays. Thirty-eight anniversaries. A Valentine from 1979 with a coffee ring on it. He had kept every single one, in order, with the envelopes.
I carried that box up my own front walk with both arms and Paula did not say a word. She untied the other five bags herself and carried everything back in, one load at a time, and it took her until dark. Neither of us spoke. At about 8:30 she sat down on the floor of the back bedroom with his flannel shirt in her lap and cried in a way I had not heard since she was small.
The room is still his room. Paula comes on Thursdays now and sometimes we sit in there and she asks me about him – real questions, ones she never asked before. The shoebox is on my nightstand. Some people think grief is clutter to be hauled off before the neighbors notice – and sometimes the thing they were so eager to throw away is the only proof left of how much you were loved.
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