Stuff

In amongst all the swirling newness of life without Steve, there is also an extraordinary amount of stuff that sits silently waiting to be attended to. The stuff that he accumulated in his life.

Mostly, it’s his clothes. Clothes are hard. Clothes are memories, of where they were bought and where they were worn and things that were done while wearing them. Clothes feature in precious photographs, linking the garment in your hands to the moment the camera captured, however long ago. Clothes absorb something of the wearer, they carry a lingering scent. Steve’s clothes carry the scent of him. I can’t smell anything at all with my post-Covid sense loss, but I know that his scent is still there. I long to smell it again. But I’ve started packing away his clothes very gradually for donating to a charity shop. I find it’s taking me far longer than I thought it would.

Some things are easy. Some things are associated with his cancer, and I don’t want them around to remind me. Pyjamas and slippers bought for hospital stays went straight into one of the first charity shop bags. All of the other things that were connected to his increasing pain and indignity went into the bin the day after he died, I needed to get rid of them, they affronted me with their existence and the fact he had needed them, and I bundled them up and out in a kind of controlled fury.

Other clothes belong to the far distant past or were easy to make instant ‘keep or throw’ decisions on. His suits, from the days when he was working at the IAM, more than a decade ago – they might find a new owner who needs to dress smartly. A ridiculous number of ties. His work polo shirts, complete with company logo – I doubt anyone will want them, but you never know. I found I could be quite pragmatic about these clothes; they weren’t strongly associated with him, with us. Shoes were easy too. What would I do with his shoes? The only ones I have kept are the ones we bought together for him when we went shopping for our wedding, beautiful, blue suede, Hugo Boss boots.

So now I have nine bags full, ready to go to the charity shop. In amongst Steve’s suits and shirts and jeans are also clothes of mine, clothes that I won’t ever wear again but had been keeping ‘just in case’ – for a future that now isn’t going to happen. Evening dresses, and cocktail dresses and smart stuff that I might have one day worn to go somewhere with him. Clothes that are too big for me now after the strain of the last year – bought when we were ‘fat and happy’ and oblivious to what was coming. Beachwear and bikinis that I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing now, without his approving and protective presence saying, ‘Who cares? You are gorgeous’ when I wondered whether it was appropriate to be parading my almost 60-year-old body on the Portuguese beach we loved so much. High heels. He loved me in them. I’m not wearing them again, not now he’s gone.

And I’ve kept just a few of his clothes. Carefully selected because they are just so him – his beautiful Jaeger black cashmere coat. Some of his linen shirts, because I’ll wear them. The jeans and shirt he wore for our wedding. His black leather jacket that he was wearing in the photo on the front of the order of service for his funeral – the order of service that wasn’t an order of service at all, just the lyrics from the music he’d chosen. His dressing gown. His T-shirts. I hope that if my sense of smell ever comes back, I’ll be able to smell his scent again on his T-shirts. His Blue Knights waistcoat that he carefully pinned all kinds of pins to, including a little prostate cancer man pin. His biker jacket that I wore to ride pillion with Lucy on the motorcycle hearse, next to his coffin. Important clothes that carry embedded within them moments to treasure and memories to cherish.

As far as the rest of his stuff, I think it will take months to go through and re-home. He has more tools than anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s without the contents of the three garages he rented. With heroic effort from Steve’s son, the ‘stuff’ that he’d accumulated and stored in the garages has now been reduced to fill just one.

The house is full of his things, bits and pieces that caught his eye and that he bought from antique shops, things that belonged to his parents, books and albums, memorabilia from different eras in his life, framed photos and pictures. Everywhere. I can’t even begin to think what’s up in the loft, I just have memories of handing him bags and bags and boxes that he squirreled away up there when we moved back here.

Group photos from his police life, the life before we met, had been hung in pride of place in the living room. He wanted to feel he was at home here, in my old family home that we moved back in to together in March, just before the first lockdown was announced, and creating a ‘Steve’ corner meant a lot to him. After he died, they seemed somehow out of place. He didn’t need them to be there anymore. And I didn’t need to be looking at photos of the young Steve amongst all those long ago, unknown fellow officers. There was nothing in them that spoke to me. I took them down, before the funeral, and replaced them with a beautiful copper coil clock that we had been given as a wedding present by Lucy – the funeral director who looked after Steve when he died. That felt like the right thing to do.

All the guidance on bereavement and grief tells you not to make big decisions during these early weeks and months after a death has occurred. But I think, for me, I am ok to be deciding on what is surrounding me. I’m trusting my instincts as I work my way through the days, and I instinctively feel that making space is what I need – in order to feel him more closely.

If there isn’t a strong resonance with him – his memory, his energy – when I pick up a piece of clothing or a book or a picture, then I know I can let it go. I intuitively feel that if there is less of the unimportant stuff of his imposing itself on me, then the pieces that I choose to hold on to will be even more precious, more meaningful, more important to carry forward. That won’t be the same for everyone, but I feel like it’s right for me. And I feel like it’s the right time to do it now. Now the charity shops are opening here again, I’m starting to clear the space around me. And that feels like a good thing, in this strange new place I am in. I feel I can breathe a little more easily.