To a T

Like any family with children, we have a ton of clothes the kids have outgrown and nowhere good to send them. The problems is that ours just carry a bit more emotional weight.

The T-shirt here probably takes the case to the extreme. I purchased this in 1992, give or take a year, and gave it to my nephew Karl, then 3, as a Christmas gift. It was then worn by umpteen of his siblings before my sister-in-law mailed it to me for Noah to wear. Noah got his use out of it and then it became Colin’s. Towards the end, it was one of only a handful of T-shirts he would let us put on him. We never quite figured out why – Christina suspects he associated anything new with being bad – but he would still manage to kick up a fuss if you tried to dress him in something from the non-approved list of about five T-shirts. Anyone who has done laundry for a family of five – even in normal conditions – knows how hard it is to keep the right five T-shirts in regular circulation. It got stressful.

And even beyond Colin’s love of the T-shirt, it’s one of my favorite ones because he wore it on our outing to Irrlandia, this family park outside Berlin, in 2018. It certainly wasn’t our last time together as a family of five, but it’s the one that stands out the strongest in my memory. It was a dumb summer. We couldn’t coordinate a vacation to get away from Berlin, so we were going to do it in 2019. We made the best we could of weekend trips. Then I went away to Australia, he started getting sick and, by December he was in the hospital. But we had that day in Irrlandia and he had am amazing time. I’ve posted the picture here before of him and me in the park’s maize maze. It’s a good memory.

Anyways, the shirt is now on its way to the States. My niece, Tara, is expecting a child and I figure the kid should continue the Sorrells/Elvis tradition. And maybe Karl will have a kid at some point and then, man, that will probably turn out to be the most cost-effective purchase of my entire life.

But to find the Elvis shirt we had to find the other clothes. It reminded us that we still have a fair number of his clothes stored in the closet in Noah’s room, since the boys ostensibly shared a room (even though Colin ended up in our bed every night). It feels unfair to Noah to have Colin’s clothes still there, perfectly visible each time he goes to grab one of his T-shirts. At the same time, I wonder if Noah will be upset if we try to remove the clothes. You never know how these things will play out. He might like having the memory there. Maybe so long as the clothes are there, it’s still the room he shares with his brother. Every step of this path, even 17 months after his death requires so much negotiation.

It also reminded us that we still had at least a box of his clothes upstairs in the attic and that, if we want to preserve them, they probably need to be stored better than tossed into a box in the attic. And then there’s the question of where to put them. And then there’s the question that the guest room – which was his room for the two months we were all here between the rehab therapy and the hospice – remains stuck in this halfway state between the room where he was when he was sick and a guest room and none of us really with the energy to rearrange things so it’s a room we can use. And that’s assuming any of us want to use the room. We barely ever go in it.

The truth is, the lockdown has given us a lot of time to work on household projects, but in some ways it traps us inside with them too. There are a thousand good reasons to sort through his clothes and his room. But there’s also one good reason not to: We might still not be ready.