It has been three years since we lost J to cancer.

Lately I have been slowly warming to the task of sorting and organizing her old belongings - identifying items for storage, others to finally discard. Three years may seem a long time to get to this point, but things can take on a special power after the former owner has been irretrievably lost. Aside from the important things that are clearly to be kept , there’s the stubborn persistence of smaller, seemingly forgettable items, in any other context transient and disposable. But now I find myself stuck in the midst of everyday clutter, finding much of it charged with new significance, capable of triggering any number of memories and associations. Some things I can barely touch, much less even begin to want to throw away.

Not long ago while I was cooking dinner, my thirteen year old daughter rushed into the kitchen with a delighted expression, holding a small blue bottle of Vick’s VapoRub.

“This is the stuff Mama used to rub on my neck and chest when I was sick!”.

“Wow, yeah it sure is!” I said, giving her a smile.

She returned it to the downstairs bathroom, leaving it on the counter. For her, I imagine it was like unearthing an ancient relic from a long ago, dimly remembered past. To me it seems like yesterday that her mother rubbed ointment from that very same small blue jar onto our daughter’s skin. That little jar has remained there on the bathroom counter. I can’t seem to find the urge to store it in the cabinet below. I like seeing it there, I guess. A reminder, perhaps, of her mother’s care and attention.

A project to collect and store various sundry items stalled out with several boxes left in the bedroom, sitting in a row, still open, waiting to be sealed up and put away. Each morning I see them and make a mental note to finish the job, but it never makes the official TODO list to complete. A blue glazed ceramic tea pot still sits on J’s night table, the cap which doubles as a cup resting loosely on top. There it has remained, exactly where she left it. Next to a couple pair of glasses, a favorite framed picture of the kids: all four stand in front of a Christmas tree farm that we had visited in years past. The sought after trees are conspicuously absent in the wide barren fields beyond. We all shared a good laugh at that: a long, early morning trip to the Christmas tree farm, only to arrive and find out that there were no more trees. In the picture, the kids look tired but amused, silly, delirious. Our then five year old caught in the middle of a huge laugh; she leans away from the others, head turned up, sharing her amusement with the clear blue December sky. I have disturbed little on this table. Some things are just too charged with presence. To move or put away these things is just one more parting, one more goodbye.

But sometimes I see some old thing, resting in the same spot where it has sat for years most likely, and a curiosity grabs me, and I will reach for it and commence an inspection as if I have never seen it before. I am looking for something, searching. What exactly is not entirely clear. Several months ago I came across my Dad’s wallet in an old shoebox, and in between the pockets filled with id cards and registrations, there was the laminated album with picture after picture of me: in my high school graduation gown; in my senior year tuxedo. It gave me a smile. And I suppose this is near to what I search for: one last token that might hold a lost and buried signal from the past, and in the finding there is the hope of one last insight, one last message, one last connection. I am sure I am not alone in this kind of search. But if it truly is a desire for connection, then it can no longer be satisfied by those we search for in the surrendered belongings of their bygone lives. Not in any lasting sense. But some part of us, our hearts, I suppose, has not accepted this. It is like a phantom limb, but instead of a limb, a phantom partner: some prerational place within us reaches out for them, but they are gone.

Some part of us hasn’t received the message. In grief support groups I have talked with others that have experienced this pervasive sense of sheer astonishment at their partner’s absence, even when the passing was expected. No matter how confidently predicted the eventual death, we find ourselves stunned. Some primitive part of us simply cannot process the new, unwanted reality: that someone that was once so solidly here has now vanished from the face of the earth. J’s former possessions can trigger this reeling of disbelief in me: she was just recently as real and solid as this ceramic tea pot, as this picture frame, as this pair of reading glasses, as that small blue jar of VapoRub. How is this stuff still here and she is not? It is as if the agony of grief disrupts and splits us so deeply that the very core of our conceptual grasp of mere things is rattled and called into question. We are once again struggling with notions of object permanence.

Last summer while cleaning out a closet, I came across an old handbag of J’s. A large black bag with a white floral print and a zipper, padded shoulder strap, and elastic pockets on either ends to hold a water bottle. A beach bag. But we seldom made it to beach. Memory serves up images of the large bag hanging from her shoulder on our way to the playground, or to family outings at the park, or kids’ soccer games or cross country track meets. Picnics: the time we had a picnic on a beautiful fall day at Tribble Mill Park, and spread a blanket in the middle of the large, lush green meadow in front of the playground on Ozora Lake. Our youngest had a sudden nose bleed though and we had to wrap things up early. We walked around the same lake on our first date, and we often visited there on weekends to walk and talk, reviewing the week together, or making plans for the future. The same lake where I would scatter her ashes, and returned a year later to sit in the endless green grass and stare down at the quiet, placid water.

In the old handbag was stuffed a floppy hat with a hemp or straw-like weave and a broad brim, a summer hat. It was not one that I recalled seeing often, but I distinctly remembered J wearing it in a picture taken at Six Flags. It then occurred to me that it was one of many pictures pinned into a larger collage that still hung on the wall near the dinner table. Was it there or was I just imagining it? I rushed downstairs to check, and sure enough, there was the picture of the two of us, and J with the same broad brimmed hat. She beams a bright, happy smile, which was somewhat uncharacteristic of her when confronted with a camera lens. She wasn’t usually a fan of having her picture taken, and she rarely struck a pose. I was always taking pictures though, and in many she is clearly just enduring the process, meeting the camera eye with a patient glare.

In some of the earliest photos she can barely look into the camera, shyly averting her gaze. In a video from the fall of 2005, the two of us still falling in love, she sits next to me in the Atlanta airport, thumbing through a magazine, as we wait to board a plane to California. She briefly looks up, spots the camera and quickly turns away, laughing but indignant, “What are you doing?!”

And in this picture, pinned in the middle the collage, and which I later dated to the spring of 2009, her eyes are hidden behind sunglasses. As was often the case in photos, most frequently oversized Jackie O’s. But it was a bright sunny summer day, and I’m sure I took this as an impulsive “couple selfie” of the two of us as we strolled through the amusement park. No time to shed our sunnies. Mine are green rimmed and too small for my broad face. I distinctly remember hastily grabbing these from a bowl on a side table as I rushed out the door that morning.

On some whim, I unlatched the photo from the small metal clamp that clipped it to the collage. As I did, I noticed there was something attached to the back of the photo. In fact, several things: a stack of cards, roughly 3 square inches in size. Reading the first one on top, I quickly realized, to my astonishment, the cards were the message inserts from flowers I had sent to her office over several years of Mother’s Days and anniversaries.

So there it was: the sought after message, the lost signal from our ever receding past. The literal message, machine printed to resemble a handwritten script, was from me to her. But the real signal that I searched for was her apparent saving of these terse missives in a tidy stack behind a picture of us on a long ago sunny spring day. The first one read:

I am so grateful for the life we have together. Most of all, just for you.