Monthly Archives: August 2010

Did Dante Designate a Hell for People who Throw Away Greeting Cards?


As I organize, and I am using the term rather loosely at the moment, I run into the perpetual issue of cards.

Birthday cards. Valentine’s wishes. Christmas greetings. Sympathy noted. Wedding congratulations. Merely thinking about you missives.

Cards coming out the ying-yang here and some going back years.

I even have a gift sack full of sympathy cards from my late husband’s visitation that I ransacked for cash and abandoned – unread for the most part and most definitely never responded to. Cue Miss Manners her tongue cluck.

“What should I do with them?” I asked Rob. “Someone paid money for them.”

I think it’s the money spent that stops my hand at the shredder more than the thoughts or motives behind the mailing of them.

Not long ago, I bought a mess of the darn things myself at the grocery. Summer birthday wishes and Father’s Day.

“Look at these!” exclaimed the cashier. “Cards! I haven’t checked any through in I can’t remember when. People just don’t send this stuff anymore.”

I felt like a relic. An antique who hordes them as well as perpetuates their tribble like accumulation in society.

“Well,” Rob said in response to my query, “I can’t help you. I have a bunch of yours myself.”

Now I am slightly offended. Of course you have mine!

“I keep yours!”

“Why?”

“Because you gave them to me and you wrote little notes in them,” I said, snuggling under his chin.

And there is the crux of the matter.

I keep cards and notes of those I hold dear and consider the paperstock of others to be no better than unsolicited junk mail.

However, I can’t keep every card that is sent to me, my daughter or Rob and I. There is an “enough” point and I have reached it. The problem is to avoid the whole “guilt” thing. And it’s tricky.

For example, I feel not the tiniest bit of guilt for not responding to the sympathy cards that are sitting still in that sack, but I feel guilt about throwing them away. The cards themselves mean nothing, but the reason they were sent does. Therefore, the cards endure long after they should have been recycled.

The idiocy of this is not lost on me because not only did I keep them but fifteen months after the fact, I packed them and transported them to another country, where they continue to not be replied to or looked at or do anything other than take up valuable space. Space that is premium – as all space is.

The same can be said of paper in general. We keep far more than is necessary. I have two file folders full of the daily reports that Dee’s daycare kept, recording what she ate, when she slept, and anything of note. I have nearly three years worth of these reports.

Why? Because I stopped journaling her daily activities at the end of the first year. Un-coincidentally this is when her father took quite ill. In my mind, the reports are part of her “baby” record. I was too preoccupied to keep obsessive track of her “firsts” and thought I would go back later and scan the reports for highlights and compile them.

Dee is eight years old. The reports are still in a file cabinet – which also traveled internationally .

The madness!

“I just want to rent a dumpster and pitch everything in without stopping to look at it,” I told Rob.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Let’s.”

It’s not really that irrational a solution. I have, after all, purged an entire house of possessions. Literally given away thousands of dollars in furnishings, clothes and household goods without really blinking or looking back in angst. It’s not so silly an idea.

What is it about paper? Whether it’s words or photos, it’s so much harder to part with.

I.C.E.


I am big on being prepared. Even if the preparation consists of nothing more than periodic dress rehearsals in my daydreams.

It’s weird to daydream about disaster and tragedy, but I was the little girl whose Barbies’ were all widowed women. And I was the teen who stared out the window of Sister Jean Freund’s South American history class and fantasized Red Dawn scenario’s. The readiness is all, as Hamlet would say once he quit whining.

During last summer’s mini-health alert, Rob put a file together for me containing all the “just in case” information. It was overkill. But it helped knowing that neither of us would be forced to wade through boxes in search of policy numbers and phone contacts. Sometimes having the details worked through in advance makes it easier to face the unthinkable.

But when he had his heart-attack, I realized that I had no idea where the file had gotten to. In our perpetual state of renovation, the minutia of life shifts from room to room, depending on where the hot reno action is taking place.

Rob took the office apart right after Christmas and the contents of the room were scattered in totes, boxes and file cabinets between the living and dining rooms. The file vanished into the triangle.

We’ve been putting the office back together these last few days, and Rob decided we needed an I.C.E. binder.

In case of emergency – crack open.

There are two of them and they have a prominent place in the organizing cabinet. Everything pertinent to life after one of our death’s is there.

“You’ll need it, ” he said, “as it’s clear now that you will outlive me.”

I scoffed and reminded him that I could be wiped out in an instant on the road from town or at the intersection. And for all we actually know, my heart could be riddled with disease just waiting to surprise us.

But I am always cognizant of the promise I made before we married, that I would let him go first. Even though it’s not my call, I did offer and the universe has a way of taking one at one’s word in these matters.

At any rate, Rob was quite sober yesterday as we discussed the I.C.E. book. He’s chafed a bit this last week. He is still on driving restriction, forbidden to engage in work even via email and bored out of his mind.

He doesn’t look sick at all. I had another husband who didn’t look sick to the naked  eye either once.

On his walk yesterday though, he overdid it. Went too far and then had to get himself back because he forgot to take his cell phone.

Six miles.

At about an hour and a half, I began to toy with the idea of hopping in the truck to go look for him. He was surprised to see I hadn’t when he finally got home – which is telling.

“I thought about Shelley, ” he said. “She used to walk that same loop with edema and a compression bandage on her leg and cancer spreading everywhere. If she could finish it, so could I.”

He is stubborn like that, but this morning he is still in bed at 10 AM.

In case of emergency, you break glass or open a binder. I am not there and I may never be. But I could be. So we organize, just in case.

Elephants


Elephants figure heavily in terms of memory.

“Memory like an elephant”

“Elephants in the room”

I was reminded of this by a friend dealing with dates embedded with ghostly elephants and as references do, it lead me here:

My oldest nephew always cuddled close during the heffalump sequence.

The interesting thing to me is how something as sturdy and true as an elephant acquired such worrisome emotional baggage.

Power of suggestion, I guess.