That which remains

I recently had to start using Caringbridge again, because a friend has ended up in the hospital under pretty miserable circumstances that are not mine to tell here. Just take a rough medical situation, which is not Covid-19, and then multiply it by being in a hospital amid the coronacrisis and, there you go: medical nightmare.

There was, of course, the moment of “Thank God I hadn’t gotten rid of this” when I fired up the Caringbridge app for the first time in months, even though it’s now been relegated to page 3 of my smartphone apps.

But then there was this moment of “Exactly why is it still here?”

And the simple answer is that I’m just not ready to give it up yet. I don’t use it. I don’t need it. I could easily track my friend’s status using my laptop. I’d actually prefer to use the laptop for that. And yet, this app meant so much to me for so long. Every time I looked at it for all those months there was a new heart. I couldn’t tell with the smartphone app who had left the heart (it only worked on the laptop for some reason), but just knowing there was another heart or a comment (those I could read on the phone), was so huge.

I don’t know if I’m ever going to get rid of the app. It would feel like abandoning someone who helped me through a pretty rough storm. So, there it lingers.

It’s not the only thing. I was talking to the friend last night and commenting on how Colin’s play kitchen and workshop remain here in our living room. There is a part of me that really wants those upstairs, if not all the way in the attic. And yet … I can’t muster the energy to pick them up and move them to a different part of the house. Same goes for all his toys strewn throughout the house. Yes, we’ve put them in tidy stacks, but even as I’m facing three weeks of essential house arrest due to the virus and the fact that I finally have to burn off my unused 2019 vacation – and I have plans to clean things up – I foresee that I’ll find ways to do something – anything – that doesn’t involve even starting to think about what should stay and what should go and what should get backed up in the attic and what should be left out for memory’s sake. And by doing that I just leave all the memories out and about (and on my phone) for us all to trip over.

But I guess I’m not ready to not be tripping all the time just yet.