Why It's So Hard to Part With a Lost Loved One's Things

Matteo Minoglio/Unspash

Tom was a guitarist, and in the months after he died, I found guitar picks everywhere, fallen from his pockets or the neck of his guitar, where he sometimes tucked them under the strings. Sometimes they turned up in places so unlikely that I permitted myself to receive them as a nod and a wink from the other side. Every time I found a pick, I’d put it in the souvenir ceramic Elvis ashtray that lived on Tom’s dresser.

It's been years now since I’ve found a pick. A pile of them still collects dust in that dish, sitting near his wallet and keys. As we approach four years since Tom’s death, there are likely no more picks waiting to be found. I have found them all.

Fingerprints Fade with Time

Tom has been gone long enough that now I rarely can touch something and think, He was the last person to touch this. Just about everything in the house has been touched, moved, or replaced since he was last here. For months after he died, I would take something out of the pantry—a can of beans, say—and think he bought these. A widow friend confessed—and I will own up to thinking the same—that the first time she emptied the vacuum cleaner bag, she thought, His DNA is in there.

Today, Tom’s fingerprints in the house are all but erased. What remains, life-sized and taking up a great deal of space both physically and psychically, is his stuff. His clothes, his books, his records and CDs, his music equipment, his truck. And I struggle to part with it all.

“Take all the time you need,” people reassure me. Yes, I understand that it’s entirely up to me when to let things go. I think the time has come. After a point, the weight of living within an unrecoverable past starts feeling too heavy, an impediment to joy.

That doesn't mean it's easy for me.

Some People Toss, Some People Cling

Consider this: It took more than a year after Tom's death before I was able to remove his toothbrush from my toothbrush holder. Even then, I put it in a drawer. It was at least another year before I managed to throw it away.

Some people can empty the closets right away, toss the toothbrush in the trash. I know one man who, after his wife’s death, never again lived in the home they shared together; he stayed with family until he was able to move to a different city.

We all deal with the things left behind differently. I have been clinging. But my grasp is finally loosening.

Why Is It So Hard?

Tom left plenty of beautiful things that I will keep, like his artwork and his beloved Telecaster, his favorite guitar, which will remain prominently displayed in my hallway for the foreseeable future.

His closetful of clothes, though? Why keep those?

Right after Tom’s death, his clothes still held his scent, his aura. I would go into his closet and hold armfuls of his shirts, breathing them in. I wear many of his pullovers, and over the years, I’ve given some of the nicer things to friends. I recently was able to part with enough of his T-shirts to have a quilt made from them.

But there’s still a closet full of clothes just hanging there, getting sadder and sadder. His scent is dissipating. Why don't I haul them to Goodwill? It’s not that I actually think he’s going to return and need them, but getting rid of them seems so final. Like giving up. Like he’s… dead or something.

This is the magical thinking that Joan Didion wrote about in her gorgeous (painful, true) book about losing her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. It's completely involuntary. You believe what happened, but it’s so unbelievable that you can’t completely believe it. Part of you clings to the crazy hope—knowing it’s crazy—that maybe this whole business is reversible. Maybe it was a nightmare you’ll wake from. Maybe he was just kidding.

Time has a way of prying hope out of your hands, but this can’t be rushed. You accept the reality when you accept it, peeling down, one painful layer at a time, to the truth of it.

For me, letting go of the stuff is a close-to-the-bone layer.

Museum of a Life That Is No More

In a recent New York Times interview, a man who’d redecorated his apartment after losing his partner explained, “I didn’t want to live in a museum.” I read that and looked around and realized I lived in the museum of a life that no longer exists.

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I don’t want to change my life completely. I love my house and, for the time being, will stay put. But I don’t need—or even want, anymore—to live in the house exactly as it was for the twenty-odd years we lived here together. I feel coming over me a great shedding, lightening my load to carry with me into the future only what will serve me.

And that doesn’t include Tom’s truck, moldering in my driveway, immobile since 2020. Big Black is a fine old truck, and we took some great trips in it, but I know someone who wants it, and although I’ll cry, it’s time to let it go.

Part of this is my age, I’m sure. It’s said that you spend the first half of your life acquiring, and the last getting rid of things. I believe this to be true. You suddenly look around and think, “Who needs all this crap?”

He'll Live in My Heart More Than My House

Still, even the little decisions are decisions. The other day, I suddenly noticed the guitar magnets on the garage fridge. How do they make me feel when I see them? For now, they make me feel tender, so they stay. But the random bric-a-brac we collected over the years? Meh. Lots of it will go. It isn’t all meaningful. Some of it is just stuff. Tom would be fine with this. He was never as sentimental as I was to begin with.

As I go through my days, I am tossing. His old medicines. Scratched reading glasses. The mysterious bits of plastic and metal that you stick in a drawer because you might figure out what it’s for someday. There’s no one to ask, “Do you remember what this is for?” and so out it goes. I am burrowing deep into the house until, eventually, it will contain no nook or corner that I do not know. (Assuming I one day gather the strength for his top dresser drawer, his personal junk drawer, which is still too heartbreaking to take on.) Someday, the mystery of another human being in the space will have been cleared away.

Tom will always remain with me in important ways. We were together most of my life. He helped to form me and lives on within me. But the everyday detritus of his life and our life together feels burdensome and doesn't need to take up room in my future. It's time to let go. If I can.

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