What a year makes
It’s been a strange 12 months:
- Just over a year ago, a friend died at age 45 from leukemia.
- About eight months ago, my last uncle died.
- Two friends needed surgery, one of which was a heart transplant.
- I herniated a disc so badly that I had to have my vertebrae in my neck fused and am still waiting for the bones to mend.
In addition, throw in all the drama about the economy, swine flu and major reorganizations at work and the last twelve months has been stressful.
Mysterious Artifacts
My other uncle died several years ago. Recently, my aunt (his wife) found a pin from a nursing school in a box my uncle kept. The pin was from near 1900 and had a name that nobody in the family knows. Why was the pin there? It’s a mystery.
There are similar stories as my friend’s wife cleaned up their house as she prepared to sell their house….and with my uncle who died at the start of this year.
Because I’m stuck at home wearing a neck brace, I’ve had time to wander around my house and stare at things. How many of these things would be puzzles to the person who found it, should I die? If a person went into a room to clean it out, what would strike them as odd, strange, or demanding of an explanation?
No real point to this entry except that it was fun to walk into a room and to try to imagine what the room would “say” to a stranger, to a person who was seeing it as a representation of “me” as they prepared to clean, pack and empty it.
When I get older, closer to when I am more likely to die, I’m going to go to second-hand stores and garage sales and buy little things…things I can leave in drawers, tuck into books, or put under my mattress…things that will make somebody else’s life more interesting when they find it…things that will make me seem mysterious. 
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
My parents clean out estates sometimes. The surviving relatives hire them to go through the house (as you’re imagining above) since they don’t want to be bothered, and hope that my parents find something valuable, not memorable. I’ve stopped in on quite a few of them to sift through the “trash”, and you do get a really good, although sad, idea of what their hobbies and passions were. I was at an auction once, and there were flats and flats (lots as they’re called) full of every kind of elephant statue you could imagine. That really made me sad, to think that someone had spent their life collecting these little elephants, and they all get separated into junk piles at an auction.
So if you’re lucky enough to know you’ll have a loving relative go through your stuff, make sure you’ve got a porn buddy lined up… Or just make sure you’ve got one anyway, cleaning out estates is no picnic if you’ve gotta clean out the porn drawer!
i kind of know what you mean. while recovering at my mothers, everytime i use her dumb macbook i walk into her office. right before i sit down i catch a glimpse of her shelves. she has, by far, the coolest set of bookshelves. not the shelves themselves, but little things stacked in front of the books and around them. a little bowl from italy holds loose change she acquired while in thailand and japan. pictures of my brother and i while we were babies. seashells from sanibel island she collected herself, and a dried flower from hawaii. i coulc go on, but you get the idea. little personal treasures and trophies. im not looking forward to cleaning out her condo one day, but i have dibs on all that stuff now. i hope someone says that about me one day.