Over at Planet Grief, Helen Bailey wrote an evocative and emotional post, Life, Death and Laundry, about post-death hoarding. She talks about keeping things long past their “due date” and her unwillingness to wash the bedsheets she had once shared with her husband.
Anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one will be able to relate to her motivations, I think, whether they turn to hoarding or not.
She talks about how these small pieces of memory — laundry, hairbrushes, etc. — are proof that he existed. It reminded me of the chapter in Grieving Futures called Myths and History, where I describe something I’ve come
Troy by Joseph Kranak, used with permission
to call the “Troy Syndrome”: when your personal history loses its tenuous connections to the present and your past becomes a mythology.
The city of Troy is enshrined in legend through the epic Greek poem, the Illiad. The story drifted down through the centuries and was believed to be mythology, pure and simple. Even if people wanted to believe the city once existed, they had no concrete proof. But the city does exist, and always existed, buried under dirt and sand. It was only rediscovered in the late 1800s.
When someone we love dies, the sands of time start drifting in to erase them from our lives. Routines and objects are put away or change naturally and the instinctive reaction to that is to cling to things. I parked my parents’ keychains on nails by the front door for years after they died, as if they might show up suddenly and need to drive their cars (which I had to sell) or unlock the house (which I had to abandon to foreclosure). There was no practical reason for this, at all. I did not use the keys or need them, and my parents were dead.
It was five years before I could move into a new place (I moved a lot, back then) and NOT put those keys by the front door.
That was my fight against the Troy syndrome. If the keys stayed, then it was proof that my parents had once walked this earth, that everything I remembered about them was not a myth.
Eventually, I think, we come a certain level of acceptance with the Troy Syndrome, but I don’t think it ever goes away completely. I still have one of my mother’s death-bed pillowcases, unwashed and folded, sitting at bottom of my linens draw. I never touch it.
But it’s there. As, at one point in time, was my mother.
