My big house clean-out is mostly done. One major task remains. Closets. I still have several closets filled with my wife’s clothes. Dresses, sweaters, skirts, shoes. What do I make of all these clothes?
Image by Midjourney
When the clothes go, it feels like goodbye. Everything else felt easy, in comparison. My sorting algorithm went like this: Photos and letters, keep them. Work notes and textbooks, out they go. Sentimental, keep. Mundane, toss. But clothes are in a special category. When I see this red dress with the small spiral patch, I see my wife before me, wearing it. She is elegant. We are getting ready for a night out. The sitter has arrived, and my wife is leaning in close to the bathroom mirror as she puts on mascara. Always a multi-tasker, she calls out to me: Look up parking near the theater! And check the traffic on Google Maps.
When the red dress leaves, that image, that much of my working memory, starts to unravel. It is a slow, subdued ripping sound in the center of my head.
At the same time, I don’t want to hold on to these things forever. The nice thing about these clothes is that they can still do somebody else good. They can live again. I want them to be out there in the world making someone else sparkle just as my wife did when she wore that long blue dress. Someone else should have a night like the one this outfit calls to mind. It makes me happy to picture these things re-animated, no longer dangling unseen in a dark closet. It’s time to donate them and hope they make somebody somewhere a little happier.
But it’s taken me a while to get around to it. One of the things that makes me hesitate is that, should my wife walk back in the door tomorrow, this is the one thing that would really annoy her.
“Welcome back,” I would say, “I missed you!”
“I missed you too!” she would reply. And then… “Wait! what did you do with my clothes? Now what am I supposed to wear?”
“I’m sorry, sweetie.”
I think you can see the importance of this consideration. Nevertheless, when pressed, this is what my poor brain offers up as resistance. Some milestones are easy, some are hard. This one caught me in the shin.
I can’t escape the feeling that these clothes, which in a literal sense embodied my wife, still contain something, still house a motive force. They were closer to her person than anything else in the house. When she danced, they danced. They expressed her taste and knew her form, even as it changed. They knew when she was getting thin. So thin. They understood. And they stood by her. With her. On her.
Clothes cling to us, but it does no good to cling to clothes. It’s time. Still, the emptiness is painful to contemplate. I’m afraid she won’t come back now. She won’t. Goodbye, red dress. Goodbye, my love. Goodbye.
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