Location: Milford, MI
Lesson: Life is disposable – follow
through, take risks, fail, dare greatly. Part 2.
Teacher: Tom
Background Part 2:
Over the last two weeks in May, I rifled through Tom’s
belongings, his memories, his treasures, and his life. I began to see a pattern
with him, based on his writing. I could identify periods of depression from the
sprawling, hard to read, shorthand documents, many full of anger and sadness.
In phases of mania, he would use bright blue ink or pencil and write in clear
thoughts, and plans.
And there were lists on top of lists. Tom had literally
thousands of little pieces of paper. It looked like typing paper he’d cut to
index card size. These pieces were everywhere. In plastic storage containers on
desks and shelves, in the pages of books, in stacks in drawers, fluttered
lonely and forgotten behind dressers and in his closet. This collection contained pieces of his mind
and soul. Flashes into moments he was grappling with, everything from ordering
a new breed of roses for his garden to trying to make peace with his own
brain. There were passwords, dreams,
ideas, goals, practice conversations, to-dos, not-to-dos and on and on.
There were two I found that felt like they may have been
towards the end. One was a song list and the other was a mantra. Both will go
with me for the rest of my life.
As I dug through an insurmountable amount of stuff, I walked
through so many emotions. For a few days that emotion was anger. Not anger he’d
made the choice to suicide. I honor that part of him. I was angry that I was
sitting in front of bits and pieces of his life making decisions about what to
do with them. A box with letters from his best friend in middle school, school
yearbooks, moments from his Boy Scout to Eagle Scout career…. love letters
from long gone women, journal after journal, photos of people I don’t know and
that weren’t identified.
Tom had briefly been married about 20 years ago to a woman
who was battling terminal cancer. He married her in an ultimate act of love in
the hospice chapel. They had a many year
love affair before her diagnosis happened. We (the family) never really knew.
And there it all was, in a box in the basement behind some old IBM operating
manuals. Wedding photos, CD of the ceremony, letters, cards, and legal papers.
A love affair worthy of a Lifetime movie (a good one) reduced to a box in a
basement. And nobody left who knew or remembered. Not really. I was so angry I
never got the chance.
I sat in anger, grief, frustration, and guilt that I had no
great ideas for the mounds and mounds of memories. I did my best to open every
single box, read through as many letters, notes and documents as I could. I had
this duality of feeling like it was none of my business, stay out of it and
thinking if I didn’t take this time, Tom would not be remembered for his
living. Only his dying. I have no idea if I did the right thing or not, but
it’s done.
The cement floor of the basement was cold and unyielding.
There was that basement smell all around and spiders that could carry off small
children, but there I sat. Day after day making piles, moving piles, re-piling
piles. I reached out to family and asked what everybody wanted and the answer
was: nothing. Not that they didn’t value Tom, we all did in so much as we knew
him. But that was just it. We didn’t know him. None of us KNEW this soul-rich,
super smart, delightfully funny, horribly ill man. And I cried for that.
I walked up and down the stairs to the basement dozens of
time, symbolically walking around where I would have thought Tom may have hung
and cursed him under my breath every single time I brought up or sat down with
pieces of his life. “Damn you Tom. You deserved better than ME deciding what to
keep.”
End the end; I had to make the choice to call in a salvage
service. All my sorting, trips to
donation centers, torture over what to do just wasn’t getting the house cleaned
out. So I made the appointment for men and dumpsters to show up and C and I
worked to make sure we’d removed anything that could possibly mean something
today or somewhere down the road.
The morning the trucks showed…..I went to pick up Tom’s
ashes. And that’s where the lesson went from head to heart. My conversations
with my brother in law in a box in my next post….
PS - One of Tom's Lists were songs that completely surprised me. Including Shut Up and Dance! So I've made a playlist on Spotify if anyone would like to hear the songs that touched Tom.
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| For Tom....
#recoveryposse #wedorecover #sicknotweak #family #backroads #roadtrip #suicide #mentalhealthishealth #nomoreshame #nostigma #bepresent
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