We got rid of some old mattresses a few weeks ago. You would have thought Noah had been locked in a dark room all summer: He acted like this was the highlight of his vacation. In fairness, it was a little exciting, because the easiest way to get them out of the house was to toss them out of the guest room window, to the patio below, before transporting them to the dump. Each removal came with a satisfying thump, as we shot a mattress to the ground and managed not to flatten anyone.
So, that was fun. And no, there’s no real denying that throwing mattresses out a window isn’t fun. But then, with me, there’s always the question if I can enjoy things like this. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with tricks with gravity, but because two of the mattresses we ditched were ones Colin had used.
We weren’t getting rid of them specifically because Colin had used them. They didn’t fit into any of our current bed frames, which was a major consideration. But there was also the reality that the mattresses were unusable. He slept on them in the guest room during the two-month interregnum between therapy and the hospice, during that whole stretch where Christina was fighting with the insurance company to get us a medical bed for Colin, the insurer fighting every step of the way. It finally arrived a month or two after we got into the hospice.
Anyways, he laid on those mattresses, and it was awkward for the minders, because they had to get down on their knees to do anything for him. And the mattresses got trashed, because there was always an accident with a feeding tube or his diaper or what-not. The mattresses were trash. They had to go.
And yet, they were his.
And I’m writing a little blind here, because I don’t know where I’m going with this thought. I certainly don’t want to hold on to every little thing that he ever touched, especially not something as mundane as a mattress. But it’s also true that there’s a closet full of his clothes that I’ve only ever worked up the courage to peek at two or three times since he died. There are also plans floating out there to set up a shelve of Colin’s things in the guest room, which we’ve done almost nothing about since he died.
We also, while we were in the hospice, took a footprint of each member of the family. It was one of the first things we did in the hospice, and I remember it kind of being a fun day, given everything. Colin, of course, wouldn’t participate, so I had to wait until he was passed out one night to take his footprint. I counted that as a pretty major victory. There was talk, once we had all the footprints gathered and scanned in, that we would make some kind of wall art for our hallway. Like fireworks of footprints, which sounded kind of nice, if not something I might have thought about doing under any other circumstances.
Yet we haven’t really done a single thing regarding those either.
I think, what I’m trying to get at, is the difficulty of weighing his things. We can’t get rid of it all. We can’t save it all. I want to feel an emotional resonance every time I touch something that was his, but I don’t always get that. Today, I looked at the English-language children’s books and realized I don’t feel as much of a gut punch as I would have thought. Then again, I had the thought for this entry while I was doing my stretching exercises in the dining room and it hit me a bit in the gut that I shouldn’t have time for these exercises. I should be chasing a 7-year-old. I should have spent the last year sitting at that dining table with him, helping him with the schoolwork that he couldn’t do in school because of the lockdown. Instead, I’ve got time to write blogs and exercise and try to push ahead with a whole range of household projects that have very little to do with any memory of Colin.
I realize it’s not one of my more coherent entries. I suspect it’s because I haven’t really processed all the thoughts. It’s because I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to get emotional about getting rid of mattresses. Yet, at the same time, I wish I did. That’s about it in a nutshell.
❤️
I missed reading this earlier because I was in the throes of moving from Brussels back to the U.S. when it posted. Your last thought strikes me because I think there is a weird guilt that comes later when we don’t have the same kind of overwhelming emotional reactions to even mundane things that hit us very early on during the grief process. Whatever the “grief process” is, I don’t know – I think there is never really an end to grief, but there hopefully is an ebbing of the most intense, soul- and energy-sucking emotions. On what to do with the clothing, I’m not sure what might exist in Germany, but when my dad died, my mom eventually had his favorite shirts and ties made into one large quilt for herself and three mini-quilts for me and my sisters (which we’ve all framed). She donated the rest for the church’s annual yard sale. It was a way to hang onto things that he liked but repurpose the things that “had to go.” Just a thought.