I was talking to Zack the other day about what to do with my wife’s clothing after she dies.
Normally, I am a purger. Whenever we moved or downsized in the past, I got rid of stuff quickly. If I hadn’t seen or used it for a year I got rid of it.
But this time it’s different.
I don’t want to purge my house of my wife’s stuff.
Some of it brings back great memories:
- Her hippy jeans with the bright red flowers that she wore when we first dated back in 1989
- Her tight skirts and miniskirts that drove me me wild for years.
- Her leather jacket, her soft sweaters and on and on…
But there’s no way I’m keeping everything. She’s got two closets and three dressers packed with clothing.
Another thing that made me pause happened a few days before she entered inpatient hospice.
Ellen asked me to send her favorite sweater to her beloved friend Lindsay. Ellen said it’s one of her favorites and she smiled to think of Lindsay wrapping herself up in it to ward off chilly evenings.
Then she asked me to send her winter jacket, hat and gloves to my son’s ex-girlfriend who had borrowed these for a vacation to New England a few years earlier.
Then she gave an entire bag of cool belts to my son’s current girlfriend. She said, “She’s artsy, creative and skinny. I think she’ll be able to wear some of these.”
Ellen wrote goodbye letters to each of them to include with the gifts. She smiled when I sent them.
I was surprised by this flurry of activity. Ellen had been in agony for over a week at the time. She could no longer sleep because the pain was unrelenting. She couldn’t stand without assistance. She couldn’t eat. She paced, rocked and moaned with pain 24/7.
And yet, she still was thinking of others up until the end.
With an unexpected surge of energy, Ellen got up and opened up her dresser.
“I’m going to sort through my clothes. The stuff I love, I want you to give to someone special. The rest, you can donate to charity.”
She started sorting out clothes onto the bed into keep, donate and give to someone special.
Tragically, like always, her pain incapacitated her once again. This time, she didn’t recover.
Which brings us back to my conversation with Zack.
I told him I planned to donate a lot of Ellen’s clothes to Goodwill or Broward Outreach. But that I wanted to keep her favorites to give to someone special. I said, I’m not sure who that will be, so I’ll just hang onto this stuff until we run into those women.
He said,
“Let’s create a shopping event for a woman’s charity. We’ll setup all of Mom’s clothes on racks and tables. Then each woman can walk through and ‘shop’ for a complete outfit. She’ll put it on and I’ll do a professional photo shoot for each woman. The women get a free outfit, a professional photo shoot and a fun experience. Then I’ll put the photos together as an art project that we can remember Mom by.”
Genius.
I love it.
We help a charity. We memorialize my wife. We see a part of her of her carry on through these women.
This project will take some work for me and Zack. I’m sure we’ll forge new bonds, share some laughs and shed some tears as we sort through his mother’s stuff and make this happen.
But it is so much more meaningful than just gathering up her stuff in trash bags and dumping it off at goodwill.
So we’re going to do it. When we do, you’ll read about it here.