Eight Boxes and a Life

Day four, and the skip is coming Tuesday, and she is sitting on the floor of the landing with her back against the airing cupboard door.

Eight boxes. Three of them are papers she has not gone through and is not going to go through in this house. Two are photographs and things from photographs, the sort of objects that only mean anything with a story attached. One is kitchen things she wants for no reason she could defend. One is clothes she has kept and will keep for perhaps a year and then not. And one is her father's, which has been in the loft since he died and which nobody has opened in twenty two years and which she has decided to open somewhere else, later, on purpose.

Everything else is going. The furniture went Thursday. The books went to two places. There is a bag for the charity shop and there is the skip.

Eighty one years.

She has been doing the arithmetic on and off for two days and it will not come out. Eighty one years of a person, and a great deal happened in them, most of which she does not know because a daughter knows perhaps a fifth of a mother, and it has come down to eight boxes and a bag and a skip arriving Tuesday.

And she is not falling apart about it. That is worth saying, because the falling apart version would be simpler. She has cried twice and both times briefly and neither time about the boxes.

What she is doing on the landing is something more like sitting with a sum that does not balance. On one side: a woman. On the other: eight boxes. And the two do not relate to each other in any way she can construct, and the not relating is what she cannot get up from.

You will have your own landing. The moment a life is set beside what remains of it and the two do not go together at all.

The comparison the psalm makes and does not soften

There is a passage in a psalm that is often read at funerals, and the first half of it is bleaker than people notice.

As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him.Psalm 103:15-17

Its place knows it no more. That is the sentence, and it is not softened anywhere.

The psalm does not say the flower is remembered by the field. It says the field forgets. It states the exact thing she is sitting with on the landing, without mitigation, and it states it as a fact about how the world is rather than as a tragedy to be resolved.

Which is the first useful thing, because it means she is not being sentimental or morbid. She is reading the situation correctly, and Scripture agrees with her reading, and there is a particular relief in being agreed with about something bleak.

And then the psalm turns, and notice exactly where it puts the weight. Not on the flower lasting longer. Not on the field remembering better. On the steadfast love of the Lord, from everlasting to everlasting, which is a different quantity altogether and is not a consolation offered in exchange for the flower.

So take it plainly: you are held inside something that runs in both directions past every ending, and that is what Psalm 103 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a funeral verse and lays it down on a landing with a back against a cupboard door.

Which is the answer to the sum, and it is an odd answer. The sum does not balance because the two sides are not the same kind of quantity. Eight boxes is a measure of possessions. Eighty one years is a person. A person was never going to be recoverable from a residue, and the failure of the arithmetic is not a discovery about her mother's life being small. It is a discovery that the arithmetic was never a valid operation.

You have been holding a sum that was never meant to balance, because the written word sets a life beside grass and then changes the subject to something that does not end, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a woman on a floor on day four.

What she is not required to do

Now the guardrail, and it is important in this category.

Nobody is telling her to keep more. There is no instruction here to rescue objects, or to build a memory, or to become the keeper of her mother's life. The skip can come on Tuesday. Six boxes would have been fine and twelve would have been fine.

And nobody is telling her that her mother's life will be remembered on earth if she does something about it. That is exactly the pressure this site does not apply, because it turns a woman's grief into a project and then makes her responsible for the outcome.

What is offered is that her mother is known, and not by her, and not by anybody who will ever have to clear a house. You are held by a regard that does not run through a daughter, because the written word puts the steadfast love from everlasting to everlasting rather than from a survivor to a survivor, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

And her own version of it, which is what she is really sitting with. You have nothing to preserve and nothing to be the last custodian of, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what stops one landing on a Thursday from becoming a duty she carries for thirty years.