All The Things You Are, by Riley Breckenridge

We put it off for as long as we could. Keeping his “things” around after he passed made it seem like he was just on a really long trip, like he’d be back eventually.

But he’s not coming back.

Six months ago we said goodbye to him. Today we said goodbye to his “things”.

It was too daunting a task for the three of us – my Mom, my brother, and me – so Dad’s family came to town. It was comforting to have them around, but it was also the first time we’d all been together since the funeral. It hasn’t been an easy road for any of us. Going through his “things”, and in the house where we’d lost him, made clear just how different things were now.

He was always fond of history. I think his appreciation of past events (and that he was a meticulous bookkeeper) led him to save a lot of things. Too many things, actually. There were files of financial records that spanned decades. There were ticket stubs: to Angels games, to local shows my band has played. There were golf scorecards from courses up and down the state. There were letters to and from friends and family, stacks of greeting cards from birthdays and anniversaries, and mounds of photos.

He’d constructed meaning from each of these items and, for one reason or another, deemed them worth saving. But it was impossible to understand that meaning without him being there to guide us.

Why that scorecard? Why that game? Why that letter?

While we emptied drawers and cabinets, flipped through files and picked apart envelopes, I wavered back and forth between trying to figure out his motives for keeping these “things” and sticking to the task at hand: getting rid of them. And all the while, I couldn’t help but think about my “things.” Why I keep what I keep, why I toss what I toss, and what (if I were to keel over and die while writing this piece) my “things” would say about me.

The truth is, I don’t really know. There are things that I keep for nostalgic reasons: my sweat-encrusted college baseball hat, a T-shirt from the first show my band ever played, a ticket stub from my first date with my girlfriend (Louis CK, at the Fonda). And there are some things that I’ve kept on accident; because I’ve forgotten to throw them out or, in some cases, forgotten I even had them. Awful demos of song ideas that I never trashed, half-written pieces of fiction and non-fiction, tickets to rock shows that I left in the pocket of a jacket and never found their way to the trash.

Each of my “things” meant something at a certain point in time. Some of them meant more than others, but just like with Dad, there’s no way that anyone could ever reconstruct the meaning of those “things” without me around. For them to try, or for them to think that they’re prolonging the value of my “things” by hanging on to them when I’m gone, seems awfully pointless.

But that doesn’t make getting rid of Dad’s stuff any easier.

Sure, there’s a point in keeping the T-shirt I gave Dad to wear to the last Angels game we went to together. Keeping a few nice shirts or pairs of shoes that I might fit into someday (but kind of hope that I don’t because Dad had about 40 pounds on me) might be better than giving them away or selling them to a consignment shop so they can be worn by a total stranger. Adding a few of his golf clubs to my bag won’t make me a better golfer (regrettably), but it’ll be nice a physical reminder to complement the memories I have of the time we shared on the course.

But keeping more of his things won’t bring him back.

We spend so much of our lives amassing “things.” Some people base a huge portion of their self-worth on how much, how many, how big. But when we’re gone, what will (or should) matter most to those left to figure out what to do with our things won’t be what we accumulated. It wouldn’t even matter if we were around to explain why those things are important.

What will matter was what happened, what we thought, what we talked about, what we shared, what we felt. We can’t keep those “things” in a drawer or a closet or a garage or a storage unit by the freeway. Those things are in our hearts and minds. And no matter how hard we try to hold onto all of them, some of them we have to let go.

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