Family Matters

 
Things

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I'm on a road trip this weekend, to Colorado, to finish cleaning out Emily's apartment and deal with her things. Good gosh, she's got a lot of things.

Had. Sorry, I'm still thinking of her in the present tense. I'm at the point now where it seems as if—oh, that she's just on a somewhat longer than usual vacation, and any minute now she'll walk through that door, or call my cellphone. And then I remember: no, she won't.

Which leaves us out in Colorado, sorting through her things. Even in a short life, she collected an enormous volume of things; mostly stuff that would mean nothing to anyone else, but everything to us. Look, here's the dress she wore on that special occasion. There's the little knickknack you bought her that one time in Fort Collins. And oh, look, here's her favorite Little Golden book. How many times did she sit in my lap while we read it? "No desserts ever unless puppies never did holes under this fence again!"

There are books. A lot of books. Oh my goodness, are there the books. Okay, she was a bookworm; it's a family trait. But beyond genetically, it's more directly my fault. For the last few years, we were separated by timezones and lifetime zones. She simply lived in later hours than I do, so this made it hard for us to connect in real-time on the phone.

No, there's more to it than that. I simply am not a good phone person. Some people can call and talk for half an hour about nothing in particular. I can't. I get impatient; fidgety. If you have something you urgently need to say to me, call me and say it. If you just want to think out-loud, write a letter or send an email. I can relax and talk aimlessly for an hour if we're together; over coffee, or a beer, or while taking a walk. But for reasons unknown, I simply cannot do it by phone.

Emily was from a different generation, obviously, and umbilically attached to her cell phone. She could call and talk for half an hour without taking a breath. But it always seemed to be at a bad time for me when she called, or at a bad time for her when I called, and so our phone calls grew further apart. To compensate, I sent her things.

She was gracious enough, of course, and once in a while I hit on a thing that pleased or amused her, and so I'd overkill it. You enjoyed that book by Author X that I sent you last week? Great, here's six more by her!

Now, here I am: up to my armpits in her books, and desperately craving her human contact instead.

That's all she ever wanted from me, really; some of my time. I realize that now. All those phone conversations that went nowhere; she didn't care what I said, she just wanted to hear my voice. It's almost as if she knew we were living on borrowed time, and that too soon, the clock was going to run out for one or the other of us. So she was trying to bank good memories, against the days ahead.

Those days are no longer ahead; they're here. And I'm in Colorado, sorting through a mountain of her things, wishing we'd had more time. That is the most valuable gift you have to give anyone: your time.

Because in the end, things are only given value by the memories you attach to them, and everything else is just junk.

Let's talk.

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FAMILY MATTERS posts at 7 a.m. each Sunday and is dedicated to serious discussions of marriage, family, children, human sexuality, and all the other things that writers ignore when they cocoon in their offices and try to create fiction. This series will run until we either run out of things to talk about, solve all the problems in the world, or you tell me to shut up and go get some professional therapy. If you have a question you'd like to ask or a topic you'd like to expound upon, send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com and we'll work it into the queue.