when things become stuff
‘What matters in life is not what happens to you,
but what you remember and how you remember it.’
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In two months, three years will have passed since my ex-husband ended our marriage and I agreed. Even after James left for Europe, a year later, I kept some of his things - books, pictures, clothes and furniture - in our basement. I think because it was inconceivable to me that he wouldn’t come back, if only to visit.
At that point, it was still our house. To call it my house, with a possessive pronoun in front, felt presumptuous, naked, shameful even. Besides our kids were still around, so it was still a family home. In any case, given the size of our basement it was no big deal to keep those things that prohibitive shipping costs prevented James from taking with him.
Unsurprisingly, given that James is a writer, the bulk of his left-behinds was books, housed in a wall-length floor-to-ceiling bookcase that he built one long hot summer, and paintings and prints gathered from decades of art collecting. There were also personal papers and objets d’art from the 18th and 19th centuries, a period he’s always been passionate about and I’ve moved away from. Plus sports shoes, CD’s, assorted crockery and a fencing sword.
Twice, in the last two months, friends went down to the basement to retrieve the items they’d stored there. Each time they entered the front basement room I left them browsing the bookcase, encouraging them to take plenty of books away on an extended loan. On both occasions, they came back upstairs with a quickly-wiped-away worried look on their faces. Even this wasn’t enough to jolt me into making a move on James’ things. The final straw came later, when my daughter returned from overseas and blurted out, in her no-need-for-tact way, ‘How come all that stuff is still in the basement?’
Only then I could I see what my friends and daughter saw in a flash. The room I passed by near daily on the way to the laundry had become a dark, damp shrine to the past, a mausoleum. Just as when we bought the house fourteen years ago, the basement room had become home to, quite apart from James’ possessions, a flotsam of out-of-date hopes and dreams - and not all of them James’. Some of those mouldy hopes and dreams were mine.
The smugness I’d felt when James and I bought our dream home, all those years ago, came back to mock me. What right had I to feel quietly superior at the breakdown of the former owners’ marriage, as expressed in their disheveled house and garden, when my own marriage would one day undergo a similar fate?
Except that I knew quite a lot about the joys, and the inertia, that can be found at the heart of home life. I’d just published a book about just this. And here, bagged up and strewn in cardboard boxes were vivid signs of the second. Everywhere I looked in that basement room, love lost stared back at me, my own Dickensian unhappily-ever-after. No wonder I instinctively half closed my eyes whenever I passed through the room to open the window for fresh air.
Now I had a choice. I could throw my hands in the air and give in to inertia. I could sell the house and leave it for the next owners to clear out the basement, just as the previous owners had done when James and I took possession of it. (The front basement room had been home to a dentist’s chair and theatre seating when we first moved in.) Equally, and more appealingly, I could open my eyes wide, roll up my sleeves and set about reversing the downward spiral. But could I really do this? Did I have it in me to give the room back to the house? I knew that with the right kind of hope and energy the room could be steered back to what it could have been if, in the headlong tangle of family life, it hadn’t taken on the role of free storage. But could I bring about this Herculean feat by myself?
What I did know for certain was that I didn’t want to become a Dickensian anti-heroine, holding my breath for the past to return me to life. Yet the task of liberating myself from James’ stuff seemed so unwelcome, so emotionally draining even to contemplate, that more weeks passed before, on a visit to the tip shop for something else, I spied a stack of milk crates just right for transporting heavy books in. Without giving in to the luxury of a second thought, I bought the stack of crates, brought them home where I piled them up outside in time for much-needed rain to fall on them.
I began by inviting friends around to pick over the basement bookcase. But even after a close friend took a small mountain of volumes away (to the chagrin of her partner as they didn’t have shelves for them), more than half the books remained glued to the shelves, flinging me guilty looks for my longing to be free of them. Next in line was a local bookseller who fossicked through the shelves, moaning all the while about the missing black-spined Penguins I’d promised him, looted by a friend earlier that day.
It’s hard to describe the mental load that has accompanied dealing with James’ left-behind things. Sticky. Heavy. A bit unreal. With tiny pricks of guilt prompting daydreams that fed into middle-of-the-night dreams, shocking in their presentness, making me aware that while I might have moved on from my marriage, whole rooms in my unconscious remain loyal to my past with James, and that in these locked rooms I might always love James, no matter what I say out loud.
Thankfully, there’s a flip side to this awareness. It has felt amazing to realise that I have the power to farewell my past with James and make way for something new, even though I can’t yet know what that something will be.
When I asked my kids to go through and take any of their father’s pictures, before I took them to be auctioned, they just shrugged, as if nothing they needed from their father could be contained in the frame of a picture.
In quiet despair, I left the stacked pictures and the books sitting sentinel in their wooden too-hard basket for another month. Meanwhile I got on with renovating in spare hours, filling holes and painting the walls and floor of a room that had always held a promise we’d never fulfilled.
One afternoon, still in my painting clothes, I took a deep breath and emailed James to ask what he wanted me to do with his left-behind things. Within hours he replied, thanking me profusely and saying that he’d like the rest of his belongings ‘to be sent back into the universe’. A weight lifted from my shoulders as I read these words. (James, I perhaps should add, has been nothing but loving and gracious since our marriage ended.)
Clearly James was busy in his new life. He, I felt without asking, had moved on. I, in contrast, had moved forward but not on, in that leaving-everything-behind sense. But then why would I want to move on from a home that I love which is big enough to share with my grown-up kids when they need it? At some point I’ll move on from my big old house. My knees will go or the council rates will soar or the garden will prove too big garden. But not now, prompted by some progress narrative there seems no intelligent reason for me to believe in.
Last weekend, after heavy rain carpeted yellow leaves from the trees above on to the ground below, I started my Sisyphean task by stacking the remains of James’ books into milk crates. It was Saturday afternoon and I’d gone down to the basement on another mission altogether, I think to unload the washing machine.
As if by magic, with every crate I packed I gained momentum for a task that, even an hour before, felt insurmountable. As soon as the first crate was in the car, I stopped asking ‘what if?’ and ‘why me?’ Instead I continued my to-and-fro journey down the side of the house, wheelbarrow tottering with stacked crates. As soon as my car was full, I drove it full of the books that held no value (multiple copies of James’ books translated into Korean and Polish) to the transfer station at the tip. It felt terrible tipping the books on to the walking floor, knowing their fate was sealed. But I also felt released from the worry of what I should do with them, a worry I hadn’t realised the weight of until friends and my daughter forced me to confront the work of moving them on.
James’ art books, large and heavy and generally more troublesome, proved harder to shift. Should I offer them to the library at the Art School? Should I store them until the next charity book sale? Eventually, they too were stacked in milk crates and locked in my car which I drove to the tip shop after yoga class the next morning. When I said to the young man who was helping unload the books that they still held some value, he looked me in the eye, smiled kindly and said, as I got back into the driver’s seat, that the books would find a good home. As I exited the tip shop, my car and heart felt much lighter.
* * *
For two long years I pretended that James’ belongings in the basement didn’t matter, that they weren’t a problem for me. I was, I said to anyone who asked, happy to do him this small favour. I acted as if the space they took up in my home and my soul were slight. Their presence wasn’t an issue. Of course I knew that James’ things were mushrooming into stuff in the basement. But I didn’t care. We had plenty of room and they weren’t my responsibility. Averting my gaze when I entered the room wasn’t neglect on my part. It was common sense.
What I couldn’t see, what I was too busy to realise, was that in disowning James’ things I gave them power over me. By putting off dealing with them until a rainy day that never happened, I cordoned them off and invited mould to grow. What I failed to see was that I could only not care about James’ things by cutting myself off from the house as a whole. Without a word being spoken, James’ things allowed me to treat the house as our house, and not my home.
After a year or so, I transferred everything belonging to James that was in cardboard boxes into plastic tubs which I shoved into a corner of the room. That was it. I’d dealt with James’ stuff. I still didn’t see James’ things - which included a wall-sized hand-drawn mural by him - as my responsibility to move on. And in refusing this I gave them free rein to beckon me, to haunt me, each time I passed by this room. It wasn’t a spooky haunting. It was more momentary than that, a passing shiver. If I’m honest, part of me liked having a physical reminder of my shared life with James lingering in the basement.
I’m still not out of the woods. Still more stuff beckons when I visit the basement. I’ve by no means made my last trip to the tip shop. But the utility room and laundry are now respectable. Less stuff is pushed to the backs of cupboards. A stack of worn linens have been composted and the half-empty paint pots are in a designated bin at the tip.
Yesterday, on returning to the auction house to pick up the two colourful rugs I won in absentee bids which I spotted when I dropped off James’ pictures, I noticed his pictures on the wall of the auction house with white stickers on each, awaiting their new owner to take them back into the universe. I paused in front of them, blinked away tears and kept walking to the car, my outstretched arms heavy with two colourful rugs.
The front basement room, now empty, awaits further renovating. But the damp smell is gone. The past has been removed and white walls and painted floors brighten it. Perhaps, now the basement room is clear, I can remember what I want to remember of my life with James, in the ways I want to remember it, rather than my eye being tripped by forlorn left-behinds, by the kind but messy ending of my marriage.
However painful this whole process has been, it’s given me the chance to say goodbye to James’ things. In stacking and sorting and heaving crates about, in handling James’ things, I watched them turn into stuff before my eyes. With this, the tendrils binding me to my life with James became that much looser, leaving me with more wriggle room than I had before.
This piece left a myriad of impressions. "Recalled to life" and even, dare I say, Dorian Gray. I felt relieved to think of your outstretched arms filled with colourful rugs. And the delicate ironies with which you observe.