Someone’s going through your stuff when you die.
Someone’s going through all of your stuff. How much have you thought about that?
Probably, it’s your spouse or offspring. You’ve got this cubby and that back-of-the-drawer and so forth, but hey, they’re thoroughly indefensible from the grave. What’s there for your wife or son to find?
I chewed on this topic while I cut the grass today. I kept coming back to comparing it to my online persona. I’ve blogged before about the motivations of people who want to be someone different online, and wondered whether any such behavior could be respectable.
I’m thinking in the same direction on your discoverable posthumous life. Maybe your loved one finds a slightly more hardcore version of you, but I am convinced that your loved one should find you.
My maternal grandfather (Papaw) preceded my maternal grandmother (Granny) in death by several years. She died in January 2003. When she did, my sister Jenny and I discovered that Papaw had AIDS.
I was livid that neither he, nor Granny, nor my mother had trusted me with this information. As far as Jenny and I knew, he had died of lung cancer. I think it likely that he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion, as opposed to a sexual encounter.
However, it doesn’t matter to me how it happened, and I resented the implicit assumption that it would.
Why else would such be withheld? It slapped me in the face, because beyond the shock (and after I had a chance to chew on it), it was like “yeah, my mom and my grandmother had no idea who I really was.”
I hope my sons are well beyond 20-something when they have to deal with my death. However, if it is to be that they are 20- to early 30-something when I die, as I was when both my grandfather and grandmother died, it’s important to me that they find their understanding of their dad—with perhaps an asterisk or two, but certainly no whole new paragraphs—in my things.
That’s an honesty thing to me. Whether it’s correct for me to feel that way I won’t pretend to tell you, but I’ve found it a remarkably consistent sentiment.
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Wow, Bo, what a timely post. As you are probably aware, my brother was found dead on June 13th. They suspect he’d been dead for several weeks prior to that. He was estranged from the family and I hadn’t seen him since my Pa’s death in late 2001. We barely lived a mile apart, “as the crow flies.” My husband and my other brother went over to his house yesterday (Friday) and went through it to see what might have been left. It was so very sad.
He was definitely a loner. He was a long-time non-recovering alcoholic and heavy smoker. He had somewhat befriended his few neighbors (so we heard from them, one of which is a Decatur Police Dept. investigator). The house was in very poor shape, barely habitable. There was food in the house, so that was a good sign. The electricity had been cut off, most recently, in Feb. 2011. How did we know? Next to the recliner where his body was found was a spiral-bound notebook. There were a few others on a shelf nearby. He’d been keeping them, as a sort of log, since about 2009. I haven’t seen them yet. I don’t know if I can even look at them. My other brother took them home with them. But my husband told me that it was basically just a month by month chronicle: what the days were like, what the weather was like, what he saw or experienced from time to time. The last entry was in April of 2011. He probably died in May.
It just breaks my heart. Way too much history to even attempt here, but let’s just say that he made his decisions and we made ours. Unfortunately, we all never came back around to a common ground. I miss him terribly and I am so very sorry things ended the way they did. I loved my big brother, but he had some major issues that we could all just never get past.
There was really nothing else in the house except for his clothes. Some film negatives. Don’t know what was on them yet. No identification. No keepsakes. No momentos. A Decatur Daily article about my Pa from the 1990s about how he’d been a barber in Decatur for over 70 years, framed and hanging on the wall.
Well. Sorry to unload. Still raw and hurting.
As someone who has been on the findee side of things, let me applaud this sentiment. And, allow me to add the notion that even if your loved ones are quite aware of your quirks, eccentricities and deep dark secrets, they STILL probably don’t want to find the “evidence” in the back of the cabinet next to the stove.
Terri, no problem, and if the sharing is therapeutic, then I’m delighted to provide an outlet. Even given its current rawness, I’m glad you sound like you’re in a healthy place with it.
‘seester, indeed not. I hope my darkest secrets are along the lines of “wow, what’s he hanging onto all this stuff for?”
I can only assume they kept it from you because they came from a different time and era where AIDS meant “something else” and they didn’t know how to handle it. A time before we were all educated on the horrific disease. Just my two cents. Don’t be too hard on them.
Oh, but you do remind me, I need to have a journal burning evening. Cause damn.
Carol, I understand where you’re coming from, but my mother and grandmother died in 2001 and 2003, respectively. That was pretty doggone far along in our understanding of HIV.
Moreover, I was 30 and (almost) 32, respectively. I had been a professional in my field for 7 and 9 years, respectively. I had been a husband for 4 and (almost) 6 years, respectively. When my grandmother died, I had been a father for 15 months.
I was a grown-up.
I shouldn’t have had to find it in her papers.