Today is March 2, 2024, the one year anniversary of the (second) mastectomy and (complicated) reconstruction which created months of visits by visiting nurses, and live-in aides and long, drawn-out healing which has left me, still uncomfortable and with compromised flexibility. Then there are the medical records. M is for mastectomy. Again. Now when dealing with medical records I am asked to fill-in another date. It was 2004. Now I have to add 20023.

March 2, is also the birthday of my first husband, Steve, who passed at the age of twenty-eight. I was twenty-six. It’s a long story. We would have been married fifty-seven years had he survived, had we stayed together, but he was very sick. This was shortly after we moved into a new apartment. One of the most vivid of memories I have is the packing his possessions in black garbage bags, about eight of them lined up against the new living room wall. They awaited pick-up by the Salvation Army. Someone came, took the bags of circa 1974 clothes and a pair of size thirteen speed-skater ice skates, and then it was all over. He was officially gone.

Robert lived in the neighborhood and he helped me unpack the boxes I moved in with. Thinking back, I had practically nothing, laughably nothing, just the the post-hippy era odds and ends that once filled a home. As our relationship developed, Robert would paint the wall that the bags had been lined up against.

We married. He hung his paintings, he built a light unit for my plants. His sofas would fill the gaps of the room which had many voids, his music always played from the stereo equipment that was housed in the wall unit he had built.

We traveled, we had two cats which my neighbor cared for when we were away. I loved that building. And then we had Evan and though the apartment was spacious, we were getting cramped. We bought a house when Evan was four. He was an amazingly gifted child, reading at eighteen months, computing by two years. Before he was a year and a half old, he would sit with a bucket of magnetic letters, the kind kids put on the refrigerator, pull them out randomly and announce their names.

“S! Q! L! G! M!” And, after taking out the letter M, he would sometimes examine it carefully and change his announcement: “Daddoo!” I think of those sweet days, so many years ago, when a child, a baby, would sit so thoughtfully and be able to tell the difference between an M and a W, then grow up and, and like his father, do so many things.

Let’s go back to things. When Robert passed in January, I gave myself permission to think about donating his clothes. One cannot comprehend that a person is gone until the process begins of the clothing removal.  While he was alive I was not able to begin the clothes-purging. It felt disrespectful, though I knew that he could and would not ever wear his clothes again.

That was the beginning of the process: the official mourning process, the never-to-be-worn again-clothes. A social worker said to me, “Isn’t that too soon to deal with?” And I answered: “he has been out of the house for thirty-eight months and he has been gone longer than that. I am trying to push forward.” She got it:

I have been in mourning for years. 

Over two days, a friend and I went through, sorted and bagged clothes for donation. Robert had a massive work wardrobe.  I was the shopper, the bargain-hunter. We sorted the things to dispose of, to hold for my son and nephew to try on and this time, along a wall there were piles of white bags full of shirts, pants, belts—haven’t even looked at ties yet, brand new packaged underwear, the suit he wore when we got married.

There is still a large zippered plastic container filled with never worn, packaged shirts which I am saving for now. He never had the need to remove them from their packaging. There are coats, some light, some heavy. A dozen sport jackets.

There were dozens of tee shirts representing every place we had been that sold them in a gift shop. Every pair of eyeglasses he ever wore is in a bag for the eye doctor’s collection box. Every key ever used for every school he ever worked in, every apartment he lived in, sitting in boxes and I wonder, what the hell am I going to do with this?

Robert’s clothes have been 80% removed from what is now my room. What remains in the room wears an imagined question mark.

In another room downstairs, is a chair piled high with the coats, still on their hangers in black plastic bags. The sport jackets, some with tags. Evan’s bed is piled with more stuff including a bag of sweaters, one cashmere still with tags, pants that might fit, shirts he might wear, two new blazers. He has to go through all of this but I know it will be too much for a him emotionally and too much physically for a guy who is happy with a couple of pairs of jeans. He wears his shirts to tatters.

This first load of stuff is destined for an organization which has yet to set up a date for pick up. It helps ex-convicts. Maybe one will be able to wear some of some of these clothes and get a job, get a life on track. I think Robert would have liked that idea. But for now, every room is in some kind of major disarray and I am not good with visual disorder that makes my eyes bounce from thing to thing and not be able to rest.

I went through this process stoically, cruelly, heartlessly. I kept no clothing souvenirs. I felt too overwhelmed by the process, too much in disbelief about the empty drawers that now, when open echo my crying. When I go into the closet that still holds a load of his stuff waiting for the second round of purging, I can now see the wall. It hasn’t been visible in over thirty years.

In that closet are old cardboard boxes all the way at the top, which would cause great squabbles: Robert felt the important ephemera were safer high in a closet than in the basement where there could be floods. Well, true, but there are so many  of these boxes. I have no idea about the contents, though he seems to have a carton of all the college newspapers he ever  edited. All on shelves I needed for my own stuff.

My friend and I pulled a carton, the first of many cartons down and began the process of exploration. The box crumbled, there were stacks of breaking envelopes holding hundreds of photographic negatives. Most negatives appeared not to have been printed. I went through the photos that were: Robert’s parents, probably just graduated from college, lying in the grass and looking at one another adoringly. All labelled by year during the 1940s; during a war, during post-war. Those young people now gone for years.

There were studio photos of Robert’s father’s family. The grandparents with the young sons who became fathers, one, Robert’s father. College portrait proofs in folders. Under it all, scattered in the bottom of the box were political lapel pins, the zeitgeist of the ’40s.

There was a shoebox of Robert’s black and white photos of Flushing, Queens in the 1970s and their negatives. Photos of his architecture school model for a transit hub in downtown Flushing. Thrown into that box was a photo of my beloved little kitten, some photos taken in Bloomsburg, PA after cousin Rob’s wedding, a time when everything was in pink bloom. A photo of us in Besançon, France.

This strange mix of time and space jolted me. The images soothed and yet agitated me. I was experiencing what Seinfeld’s George Costanza would say: “This is not good! Worlds are colliding!” It was just ONE carton. One of hundreds, all over the house. I decided after being awakened by agitation in the middle of the night, wrestling with the responsibility of archiving another person’s possessions that at least the negatives had to go. I filled a bag. It weighed about 3-5 pounds and suddenly the first box was half empty. And I was 3-5 pounds lighter. I had taken the first step in the climb up the mountain.
My conviction to begin was my safety-harness.

A strong box held his father’s crumbling papers from the army, high school diplomas from DeWitt Clinton, Julia Richmond High Schools. The first haircuts of Robert and his sister. Baby rings. More photos. I took a breath. I had inherited someone else’s life, it was taking over my own.

For me the days are confusing. These days, my identity wanders. I am lost in things, images. Who am I?

Then there is the matter of the alphabet and those two letters which when flipped can be mistaken for one another. In the world in which I live, I know which restroom to enter. On the door it says  Daddoo. Double-u. W. Women.

But when I don’t walk through doors and I am handed forms to fill out,  I am asked to check a box: I am given the choice between M or W.

I used to check the M box. Married.

Now I check W. Widow.

The Cerebral Jukebox is playing.