Downsizing
The Husband and I had the lucky chance of moving into a house just as my parents were preparing to move out of theirs and dump all of their furniture for a condo in Miami, and they were kind enough to dump it all on us. This provided several life lessons, namely that furniture sized to a suburban Kansas house essentially eats up the entire room in a suburban DC townhouse, and that just because a couch will fit in your basement doesn’t mean it will fit down the stairs to the basement. Still, we packed in a storage unit and kept all of the too-large furniture because it was a million times nicer than anything we could possibly hope to afford, and thought of it as an investment in our future, larger house.
That not having come to pass, shortly after The Husband died, I looked around at my overly-furnitured townhouse and my twitchy parents who eyed me like I was either going to crumple to pieces or turn Travis Bickle any second, and decided I could kill two birds with one stone. “There is,” I declared, “way too much shit in this house.”
They snapped up this bait, and thus began step one of my downsizing effort. It is a weird thing to consciously downsize in your mid-thirties, when most of your age group is either contemplating a second marriage or a third kid, and the only people you can relate to on HGTV shows are couples looking for a retirement villa in Boca, but step one was kind of liberating. Insofar as most of the stuff I got rid of was my parents’, and carried with it the specter of suburban Kansas life that had led me to spend the majority of my formative years studying. “No, no, keep watching TV,” the specter used to whisper to me in middle school, “then you can go to a state school, marry a neocon asshole, become a housewife and stay here with me foreverrrrrrrr.”
(Not that I have anything against housewives; as long as I didn’t have to clean or cook, I think I’d enjoy the lifestyle very much. I was mostly terrified of being stuck in Kansas for the rest of my life. And of marrying a neocon asshole out of sheer desperation, because those are the only people left in Kansas after graduation.)
Step two got me down to the two bedroom apartment I’m in now. The enormous couch set - the first purchase The Husband and I ever made together - had to go. The books were hard to get rid of, but I kept all of the ones that meant something to him - Herman Wouk, Graham Greene, Thomas Friedman, Kurt Vonnegut. The cookbooks and crazy spices that he’d loved I could at least pass on to people who would actually use them, knowing without a doubt that I fucking wouldn’t.
The clothes were the hardest, though - the suits I’d picked out for him, that I made sure were all tailored well, all his fucking shirts that had to be professionally laundered because despite two Masters degrees and a job schilling for the tech industry, he could somehow never grasp how to properly use an iron. (“Do I hold it up to my head and call someone to iron the clothing for me? I don’t understand!”)
And I’d had him cremated in his favorite suit, with his favorite shirt and tie, and then of course when we went to see him just before they cremated him I noticed that the hems on the sleeves of the shirt were all frayed and I was like Jesus Fucking Christ I can’t even get the guy a decent shirt to be cremated in but by that time he’d been refrigerated for three days so it’s not like I could swap the shirt out for a better one because he was more or less frozen stiff and what was the point anyway because it was about to be burnt to ashes, but these are the things you beat yourself up about when people die.
You never think about the first two or three things you do for a person, but the last two or three things mean the entire world, or at least you hope that maybe they can make up for whatever you messed up in the meantime, I guess. Which is amusing when countered with the fact that a portion of my father’s ashes are still sitting on top of my mother’s fridge in a plastic wine cup, but that’s a story for another time.
The latest down-sizing (in preparation for the big move to Miami) has been the most wrenching. Out went the grandfather clock and the lovely 1950s Hammond Organ that my dad had learned to play on and he’d taught me to play on but was heavy as shit and breaking down. Out went The Husband’s ties, which...man, I’d put a lot of time into picking out those ties. But even worse is what I had to hang on to.
First is the Notre Dame shirts, of which The Husband owned (as I do) several million. I couldn’t get rid of them, even though in most cases I literally own exactly the same shirts in a different size, so I’m more or less pointlessly hanging on to overly large copies of shirts I already own for no foreseeable purpose. I don’t need them to remember him by, because - like I said - I have the same shirts.
Oh, God, and his yearbooks. I can barely see any reason to hold on to my own high school yearbooks, and I know maybe a handful of people that he went to high school with. They’re all nice people, but it’s been more than twenty goddamned years. All the same, I would still feel like the worst human being alive if I got rid of these things even though I desperately want to, because I am still holding on to our entire eight-piece china set, okay? A china set we only registered for so my relatives would have something cheap and easy to buy us as a wedding gift, never once used, and that I doubt I will ever use because it would require having a dining room I never intend to have and buying a dining room table I never intend to buy.
So for the rest of my life, I will lug around one of those huge Rubbermaid containers filled with every article The Husband ever had published, in addition to (apparently) ever Notre Dame shirt he ever owned, on top of ten years of memories and pictures and experiences. And half his ashes, still (again, another story), so it’s not like I’m lacking in fond remembrances here. I’m kind of at a loss.
Luckily, in the short term, I can look forward to eighteen hours in a car with two cats who I’m sure will be thrilled with this novel experience, and having no furniture for ten days, one of the costs of downsizing being that when you move long distance, your shit will get there when it fucking gets there. Hopefully, the fourth downsizing opportunity will present itself in time, but more than likely...well, there are a lot of worse things to hold onto.
That not having come to pass, shortly after The Husband died, I looked around at my overly-furnitured townhouse and my twitchy parents who eyed me like I was either going to crumple to pieces or turn Travis Bickle any second, and decided I could kill two birds with one stone. “There is,” I declared, “way too much shit in this house.”
They snapped up this bait, and thus began step one of my downsizing effort. It is a weird thing to consciously downsize in your mid-thirties, when most of your age group is either contemplating a second marriage or a third kid, and the only people you can relate to on HGTV shows are couples looking for a retirement villa in Boca, but step one was kind of liberating. Insofar as most of the stuff I got rid of was my parents’, and carried with it the specter of suburban Kansas life that had led me to spend the majority of my formative years studying. “No, no, keep watching TV,” the specter used to whisper to me in middle school, “then you can go to a state school, marry a neocon asshole, become a housewife and stay here with me foreverrrrrrrr.”
(Not that I have anything against housewives; as long as I didn’t have to clean or cook, I think I’d enjoy the lifestyle very much. I was mostly terrified of being stuck in Kansas for the rest of my life. And of marrying a neocon asshole out of sheer desperation, because those are the only people left in Kansas after graduation.)
Step two got me down to the two bedroom apartment I’m in now. The enormous couch set - the first purchase The Husband and I ever made together - had to go. The books were hard to get rid of, but I kept all of the ones that meant something to him - Herman Wouk, Graham Greene, Thomas Friedman, Kurt Vonnegut. The cookbooks and crazy spices that he’d loved I could at least pass on to people who would actually use them, knowing without a doubt that I fucking wouldn’t.
The clothes were the hardest, though - the suits I’d picked out for him, that I made sure were all tailored well, all his fucking shirts that had to be professionally laundered because despite two Masters degrees and a job schilling for the tech industry, he could somehow never grasp how to properly use an iron. (“Do I hold it up to my head and call someone to iron the clothing for me? I don’t understand!”)
And I’d had him cremated in his favorite suit, with his favorite shirt and tie, and then of course when we went to see him just before they cremated him I noticed that the hems on the sleeves of the shirt were all frayed and I was like Jesus Fucking Christ I can’t even get the guy a decent shirt to be cremated in but by that time he’d been refrigerated for three days so it’s not like I could swap the shirt out for a better one because he was more or less frozen stiff and what was the point anyway because it was about to be burnt to ashes, but these are the things you beat yourself up about when people die.
You never think about the first two or three things you do for a person, but the last two or three things mean the entire world, or at least you hope that maybe they can make up for whatever you messed up in the meantime, I guess. Which is amusing when countered with the fact that a portion of my father’s ashes are still sitting on top of my mother’s fridge in a plastic wine cup, but that’s a story for another time.
The latest down-sizing (in preparation for the big move to Miami) has been the most wrenching. Out went the grandfather clock and the lovely 1950s Hammond Organ that my dad had learned to play on and he’d taught me to play on but was heavy as shit and breaking down. Out went The Husband’s ties, which...man, I’d put a lot of time into picking out those ties. But even worse is what I had to hang on to.
First is the Notre Dame shirts, of which The Husband owned (as I do) several million. I couldn’t get rid of them, even though in most cases I literally own exactly the same shirts in a different size, so I’m more or less pointlessly hanging on to overly large copies of shirts I already own for no foreseeable purpose. I don’t need them to remember him by, because - like I said - I have the same shirts.
Oh, God, and his yearbooks. I can barely see any reason to hold on to my own high school yearbooks, and I know maybe a handful of people that he went to high school with. They’re all nice people, but it’s been more than twenty goddamned years. All the same, I would still feel like the worst human being alive if I got rid of these things even though I desperately want to, because I am still holding on to our entire eight-piece china set, okay? A china set we only registered for so my relatives would have something cheap and easy to buy us as a wedding gift, never once used, and that I doubt I will ever use because it would require having a dining room I never intend to have and buying a dining room table I never intend to buy.
So for the rest of my life, I will lug around one of those huge Rubbermaid containers filled with every article The Husband ever had published, in addition to (apparently) ever Notre Dame shirt he ever owned, on top of ten years of memories and pictures and experiences. And half his ashes, still (again, another story), so it’s not like I’m lacking in fond remembrances here. I’m kind of at a loss.
Luckily, in the short term, I can look forward to eighteen hours in a car with two cats who I’m sure will be thrilled with this novel experience, and having no furniture for ten days, one of the costs of downsizing being that when you move long distance, your shit will get there when it fucking gets there. Hopefully, the fourth downsizing opportunity will present itself in time, but more than likely...well, there are a lot of worse things to hold onto.