Things Left Unfinished in a Life

The war on stuff in this house has been on in bits and spurts over the past three years. I've recently gotten a lot more serious about it, because 1) I just need to and 2) it's looking more and more as if Le Boyfriend will be joining me here at Casa de Craphole.

This morning's task was to go through the kitchen cabinets and my hutch, pack up the extraneous and make the Salvation Army several boxes of my trash is your treasure richer.

I did pretty good, ruthlessly packing up about fifty or sixty coffee cups I've 'collected' over the years, along with random candy and ice cream dishes, incomplete sets of glasses and one or two things that made me go 'wha?' as well as 'where in the hell did that come from?'

Then I got to the cabinets over by the stove, and pulled out two boxes that really didn't look familiar to me. The first one had random bar glasses, pewter mugs and the like that had been my late husbands. The second one also had things of his, a set of cut glass shot glasses, a few more of those pewter mugs (?) and this set of four sherry glasses, etched with his and his ex-wife's initials.

Those broke me. I had to stop, go sit on the sofa and let the tears come. I remembered him showing them to me as he was putting them in that cabinet when we moved in here in 2000, asking me if they were something we'd use, remember him apologetically noting that I maybe wouldn't want to use something that had the exe's initials on it. I know I told him that kind of stuff didn't matter to me, that if it would give him pleasure to continue to use them, we would.

So fast forward eight years, and there they were, still tucked away in the box on the bottom shelf of the bottom cabinet. He'd been divorced over ten years when we met, was clocking at least seventeen years beyond that relationship when we moved in here. We lived here another six years together, and the glasses never made an appearance.

It's one thing for me to process my stuff, and what became our stuff over the course of our relationship. Processing our stuff is difficult, but it's manageable. And it's necessary for me to take the next step into my next life.

But it's cosmically unfair that there were things he didn't get to finish.