Originally published in Crow’s Feet on Medium.com on July 30, 2023.
What goes, what stays — stuff or memories?
My partner Dave and I had each our own house when we met. We were both widowed and had homes fully stocked with the memories of past partners, both coincidentally lost to AIDS. When Dave himself passed away in 2014 (me, now a second time widowed), I eventually downsized to just one house, the one that was just mine before we met. Dave’s house was full of the things of his deceased partner, Andy, and mine with the things of my deceased partner, Wayne.
The linens particularly were a big problem. There were a lot of bathrooms and bedrooms between the two houses, enough that I could dry myself in a different towel every day for a month or so. One of the local churches was looking for linens to sew together as makeshift sleeping bags for homeless people. It was a solution to make some good use of a lot of excess fabric, a better use than ripping it all up for rags.
This one instance of successful downsizing got infectious. In the two years time it took to decamp and sell the larger of the two houses, I gave away or donated furniture, rugs, clothes, art work, china, antiques, and books. Have I left anything out? Probably, but much of the rest was just miscellaneous with no particular history behind any of it. The things I wanted to save, though, necessitated a second round of purging in the house I was keeping. Things had to go out to make room for the new things coming in.
I don’t know if I was consciously aware that I was eliminating a lot of things that reflected the preferences and tastes of our two partners who had died years before. Dave had saved Andy stuff and I had saved Wayne stuff. But it became obvious that what I was interested in maintaining in both houses were things that Dave and I had jointly attached significance to over our 13 years together. I sacrificed many traces of Andy and Wayne for the more recent evidence of my life with Dave. It was understandable that those things would be uppermost in my mind and I don’t beat myself up about exercising that prerogative.
The things of Dave’s I saved I did so for their memory value, not their utility. Dave was David W. Cook, a geographer and cartographer. After his stint in the army where he learned his craft drawing logistical maps during the Korean War, he held just two career jobs, one with the National Geographic the other with the Washington Post. For the Geographic he and his team notably mapped the Moon, Mars, and the Heavens.
Dave and I met after he’d retired (I still had a few years to go), but he continued his professional interest in mapmaking as a volunteer charting the art collections of the Washington Cathedral in DC. The art work — sculpture, stained glass, architectural elements — in a building the size of the cathedral establishes itself into its own geography, needing its own maps. For example, the ceiling vaults where the ribs join together are each “buttoned” with a boss, a sculpted plaque. All the bosses in the cathedral’s nave tell a series of mainly biblical stories. You wouldn’t know that from looking up at the ceiling because they’re a hundred feet above and the details escape you. Dave mapped all 762 of them and revealed their stories.
Though I’m a different person with different interests than Dave, I carted off with me into house number two framed maps of his work and much of the other art he created, but also all the research materials on his Cathedral work. The art and maps all have prominent places in the house, spaces I had to appropriate from other things that didn’t seem quite as important. But the research materials are in the attic, probably there to stay until whoever gets to downsize me does something with them.
I’m incapable of taking his research on the bosses and creating the book he wanted to result from it without diving into it to the depths that he did. Maybe incapable is too strong. I don’t want to remember him by becoming him. Immediately after his death, though, I had intended to. Which explains how the materials got into my attic. It was a natural reaction to keeping him strong in my mind.
If I had stuck with the plan, I would only have been able to add details or fill in blanks he’d left. He created the big picture and did it so much better than I could or was willing to do.
I hear people say that they’ll never forget their loved ones, that they will keep their memories alive always in photos, objects, restaurants, favorite TV shows, conversations with friends. I know in my case that I did not do that for long with my first partner, Wayne. He faded gradually from my day-to-day memory and over a decade his family and I stopped communicating. His name will occasionally come up in conversation with the gay friends we shared, but after a few laughs over his bad-boy sense of humor, we’ll go on to other topics. Occasionally, as now, I’ll have reason to write about him in a memoir.
The same pattern is playing out with Dave now. He had no close relatives and his gradual loss of body and mind in his final years made him put emotional distance between him and his friends, many of them with physical and mental problems of their own.
In writing this piece, I thought about those bonds we think and declare will last as long as we do. But 24 years since Wayne passed and nine years since Dave passed, I know those bonds are weaker than I thought they’d be. The necessity to engage with life made that inevitable, I suppose. Granted I didn’t keep as many tangible remembrances of our lives together, which is partly where the inevitability comes from, but I do have etched into my essence the important effects of our shared lives together. Those things I didn’t give up in the downsizing. I couldn’t if I wanted to.