I usually pride myself on the fact that I’m so organized, but I’m finding it has its downsides.
Because, while I’m organized, I’m not a packrat. And I keep files and documents around for a few years, but when they start getting eight to nine years old, I shred whatever could glean personal information and then get rid of it. It’s my own little fun OCD festival I have every year, getting rid of old files and making way for new ones.
This year it’s time to get rid of 2014. That’s the year Colin was born. So, I’m getting to make weirder choices than usual. I mean, in a given year, I might come across a warranty or something and it’s a no-brainer to keep it. What happens when I find the application for child assistance payments we made in Colin’s name? The one that made plans for his life through 2032? It’s not a terribly personal document. It tells me nothing about him or my loss. But that’s a hard one to shred. So far, I’ve set aside a few documents regarding his birth and will hold on to them. They’re terribly impersonal documents, but it feels wrong to ditch them.
And this isn’t the only instance. Again, with the organization, I keep a file with a section for each family member: birth certificates, passport photos, etc. etc. etc. Colin’s data sits there at the end, just in case he needs to get registered for something. Instead, a few weeks ago it became time to get new passports for Emma and Noah. Long experience has taught me to just take the whole file with me whenever we go to something like this, because the bureaucrats love to ask things like “Can we see both the birth certificate and the report of a birth abroad,” just to see if they can trip me up. It’s satisfying to thump down the whole binder and just say “Oh, I’ve got all that already.”
Getting to the consulate on the day of the appointment was a bit of a hubbub, mostly because my children failed to comprehend/believe (and bilingually too) that we were supposed to leave by 8:15 a.m. latest. So, there was a lot of chasing around and gnashing of teeth before we got out the door. When we returned home, I found a scrap of paper under my desk and almost ran it through the shredder, because once I’m in shredding season I just go into the zone, before I realized that it was an old, unused passport photo of Colin’s, from when he couldn’t have been more than a few months old. That felt like a near miss.
As always, I wonder about my sanity as I go through this. Is it quite sane to be so focused on shredding all these old files? Is it sane to care that much about how many binders I keep in an attic that’s not running out of space any time soon? Is it normal to enjoy shredding so much? Is it normal to hold on to such impersonal documents when they’re all I have left of my son?
I’ll answer my own question. I think slipping along on the edge of sanity might be all that’s allowing me to make the necessary mental contortions to keep functioning.
Take this example: About a week ago, I was out with Murphy when a boy biked up to us and asked why Murphy wears a muzzle. The boy looked nothing like Colin and is probably about three years or so too young to match what should be Colin’s present age. However, as I shared that Murphy has to wear a muzzle because sometimes he gets surprised and acts bad, and then he shared that he has a dog who has snapped at him, I decided that I was going to believe that this boy wasn’t real and that it was Colin visiting me in some form.
I know this is nonsense. But I like believing it.
The boy told me that the only other time he’d seen a dog with a muzzle was in England. And then he said that his trip to England had been nice, except that they either didn’t make it to Stonehenge or got there at the wrong time of day to see the rocks glow red when the sunlight hits them (I don’t remember what the problem is, nor can I vouch for any rocks turning red at Stonehenge).
About this point, he started biking away, but then he’d stop every meter or so to tell me, from increasingly distant points away, the he’d learned a lot of this about Stonehenge from some audio CDs he has, which are very nice except for a discrepancy about facts shared and the number of facts promised on the label.
And then from a bit further away he told me that he had also learned about bacteria from these CDS. He stopped a few more times to shout other information back at me, but I couldn’t make his voice out any more. That’s about when I decided this was probably Colin visiting me from the other side.
Quite sane? Not really. Better than the alternative. Definitely.
❤️