Stuff and things
Every single morning, without fail, after making any eye contact with my dog Buddy, even unintentional eye contact, he gets up from his side of the bed, lazily trudges through the blankets, and collapses onto my chest for our morning snuggles. Every. Single. Morning. Usually, this ends in me attacking him or him attacking me, playfully, of course. But in between pulling myself out of bed and the moment he plops down on me is the absolute highlight of my day. He is the cause of the first smile that appears on my face each day. I’m sure I would have more highlights if I were surrounded by more people, but here we are. Just my dog and me.
Things will never make a suitable replacement for people. Never. I discovered the term “sympathy gifting” in a widows group, from a post by a woman asking if anyone else had received things and what she was supposed to do with them. The quick and dirty explanation of sympathy gifting is that people feel bad, so they send you things in their own love or comfort language, whether that is your language or not. Sometimes they are sweet things. Sometimes they are odd things. Things from people I’ve never met. Things from people I don’t know. Multiple-page letters. Unrelated gifts. Stuff. Things.
What most of these well-meaning people don’t know is that when you lose the most important person in your life, and shock and grief set in, the process has a massive impact on your mind’s ability to function. That includes the very important decision-making process, which is how we normally spend the majority of our day. Whether we notice it or not, we are making conscious and unconscious decisions all day.
When I lost Rob, so began the slow and emotionally exhausting process of going through our things, his things, and my things. Many things. Way too many things. Things that have zero meaning, and then things like his pillow, the last shirt he wore, the birthday cards with long notes he wrote, the guitar he played the night before, his toiletries that are still in his drawer on his side of the sink, and other things I’m not ready to part with yet. They may be small things, but they have meaning to me. Along with those small things are many other things, the “stuff,” that embody thousands of decisions that still need to be made. Things I can’t keep.
What well-meaning people don’t always consider is that the death of a partner or spouse brings life changes that, prior to my firsthand experience, I just didn’t understand. It impacts your ability to care for yourself and others. Your finances. Your living situation. Your business or work. Mental health is a whole other ball game that warrants more words than would fit in this space. So, in the midst of taking a breath before the next wave of grief hit and rendered me useless, I needed to look at the stuff in packages and make decisions about what to keep. Things that people had spent their money on. Things I now felt guilty getting rid of, but had no need for.
And so they ended up stacked in the closet until I couldn’t get one of the doors open. Eventually, I felt so overwhelmed by feeling like I had to keep things because I felt guilty that I said enough was enough. The gifts were boxed up, and from that point onward, gifts were donated. I was in so much pain from loss that I couldn’t take on the emotion of guilt for getting rid of the gifts, too. Many people don’t know that I was living in an 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment that I was also running a business out of, an apartment that functioned as a storage unit for Rob’s things. Space was a very limited commodity.
All of the “stuff” that I look around at brought me very little joy, if any. Much of it isn’t meaningful. A few things are. But I have struggled horribly to make decisions about what to do with it. Rob’s family has what they want and what was meaningful to them, and it has made me realize how many physical items we can collect over a lifetime. The exhaustion of making decisions and acting on them while drowning in grief just downright sucks.
Getting rid of his things hurts. It’s so painful. Not because I love his things, but because I know he did. These were his hobbies, ways he spent his downtime, and things he used in his life. A life that no longer exists. These things are my last connections to him. A way to feel him around, even though he very much is not here.
I suppose this post is a plea to say that sending a short “I’m sorry you are hurting, and I care about you” text will outweigh sending “things” to the person who is just trying to survive. What is meaningulf: a short text, an offer to walk their dog or play with their pet, if they have children offer to do something fun with them, help with a load of laundry, bring or send food, extending an invite to take a walk, or to sit down and grab a coffee. :)