Today we had the sorting of clothes
01/09/2011 02:16 p.m.
It's never easy, in fact it's quite grim. The moment when you have to face the sorting out. It's not just the clothes, the records, the photos, the hundreds of possessions that have accumulated, no, the hardest part is sorting the memories.

He may be gone but in this pile of clothes the memories are made real. The oldest one, his University blazer, a riot of stripes and dating back to before my birth, the one I've seen many a time in the portrait his brother painted when they were both young men studying. His Master's Gown, I can just remember him wearing this on formal occasions. His dinner jacket, rarely worn but somehow it still fitted him whenever he needed it.

Then there is a period of blanks until more recent clothes and the memories become of his descent into illness. The jacket he wore the last time he was able to walk with us; the thick coat he wore to keep warm in his wheelchair; the vests, all with a slit in them where his feeding tube went.

So now they lie in a pile of bags on the floor of my van, some for the charity shop, some for recycling and a very few put back in the wardrobe until we can put it off no longer and have to face the future where the clothes too will only be memories.

Steve