“Mommy, do you see the swirlies?”
I looked over at Jack, his eyes darting all around as he looked at the ceiling.
“Swirlies?” I asked, looking at the few glow-in-the-dark stars that still remain on the ceiling. “Do you mean the stars?”
“No!” he replied. “The swirlies are going around and around the stars. There are a lot of them tonight!”
Why certain things hold so many memories
Jack and I slept in Molly and Gracie’s first bedroom for the first four and a half years of his life. The glow-in-the-dark stars I reference were there on the ceiling when we bought the house. That had been Rhys’s bedroom. There was a full solar system at that time, but thirty years later just a few stars remain.
Kenny is re-painting that room and for the first time since we moved in, we will paint the ceiling. I have a bit of a nervous tummy thinking about taking down the stars. There are two hooks in the ceiling I will also miss. Those held the pink princess netting that hung over the girls’ beds when they made that room their own!
A Course in Miracles tells us that things have no meaning. They are just matter. What gives them meaning is us, our experiences with them, the memories they hold. The physical reality of those things, however, is unchanged.
The costumes in the hall. The nail polish on the wall. The stars and hooks on the ceiling are just that, costumes, nail polish, and plastic stars. They are meaningless in their physical reality, but they hold a lifetime of memories and associations.
While Jack’s ability to “see all the swirlies” is probably a more meaningful topic on which to write, it is the things that have me all turned around today.
My mother has moved into my former downstairs office. The room she was in is empty. When we first moved in it was Caity’s room. Kenny’s daughter would sometimes come here. Then it was my office. When the girls were little, the front room became another living room because they had SO MANY toys.
In 2009 Santa came and gave the girls a bedroom for Christmas. They stayed in it until 2014. Then they moved into the big front bedroom where my sister Johanna had lived. Each transition bringing about a recreation of those spaces. While embracing the new, we honored the old.
We left the original wallpaper in the closet of the front bedroom.
We didn’t remove the stars from the ceiling in the girls’ room.
We only removed half the wallpaper and created a chair rail in Kenny’s room.
Small ways to update and modernize the old without “disappearing” it.
What grief attaches to
Molly’s death magnified my already well-ingrained desire to hold on to things. While I used to watch the TV show Hoarders with a degree of disbelief at how attached those people were to their stuff (and trash, etc.), a small part of me understands that now.
I still have so many of Molly’s things. It took us three years to empty the trash next to her bed. A water bottle in the bathroom remains right where she left it.
So, this morning I looked at the stars on the ceiling, and those hooks, and had a feeling of profound sadness wash over me. Like everything since Molly died, the memories attached to those things felt like I had lost something I would never get back.
Like when I realized I would never be in second grade again. That time only went in one direction, and it couldn’t be reversed or re-lived. In that quiet moment in an empty room, I wanted it to be 2005 again.
Before The Note in the Backpack, before the job loss, before the chaos, before Molly died. I have not felt this homesick for a long time. I have been in a bit of a haze all day.
There are no things from back then that I want. I want my life from back then. I want what I thought my future would hold. I want all of the details of a life I will never have. I want Molly. I want Gracie to have Molly. I want none of this to have happened.
Letting go without erasing the past
So, the slow relinquishing of the things is in some ways helpful. Some of them make me sad. I have a box of things from Roy that I am going to return to him. I have no desire to keep them, and they are things he would likely have use for. Or he can throw them away.
I feel some internal power in my distance and detachment from those items. I clung to them for years.
I feel aimless at times. Navigating life on a hamster wheel. Feeling like I am traveling forward but continually arriving right back where I started. At least that is how it feels. I know I am making progress, I just do not always feel like I am making progress.
The stars and the hooks will live in a baggie in a junk drawer for whomever cleans out my belongings one day will look at with confusion. Or perhaps the next time I clean the junk drawers I will throw them away.
The ceiling will be painted and bright, and the room recreated. Visible proof of the past will have disappeared, but the memories will remain, and maybe they won’t feel quite so sad.
