If You Pick It, It Will Fall Apart

Little Boxes on the Platform

Steve's home again, or at least his leftovers are. In a box inside a box, a very nice box: deep brown wood (mahogany?) with a light bird's eye maple veneer inset on the top. It's all artificial, of course; a simulation of wood, with special care instructions. I put it with the other boxes on the platform in the living room. It lends an illusion of organization and order to the house.

I'm in a kind of haze. I do my design work, which consists mostly of file maintenance right now; try to get both projects moving forward at an adequate pace. Then there are the Death Papers. Everyone who had business with Steve when he died has to be notified, documentation processed, and procedure followed to the letter. So I hop between deadlines and death, and try to make progress on things around the house in between. I shut down easily, though, and most days I take a short nap in the afternoon to change gears between these three very different chores.

The day after the last blog entry, I went down to the bank to make sure his credit card was flagged and the mortgage and equity account payments were made on time. When I got home, the Neptune Society (over Toluca Lake way in the San Fernando Valley) called to say the death certificates had arrived, Steve's cremains to go were ready, and I could drop by and pick them up, if I wanted.

So the next afternoon, I picked him up. I knew just where he was going to go; I'd known it for months: sitting at the center of the platform, a photo of him and me from an Oscar party last year at Steve and Roberto's home. He had wanted me to don a rainbow afro wig for the picture, but I felt a white feather boa was quite enough fabulousness for me, thank you very much.

A lot of my time is taken up with folding, bagging and making an inventory of his things, since I plan to donate most stuff to the Rescue Mission and Out of the Closet. So a fond memory is touched with each shirt I fold, each pair of shoes I match up and carefully tie together: walking through the old-growth redwoods in Eureka, strolling through the Louvre in Paris.

The strangest thing so far, though, has been pulling out boxes that I have never seen open since I moved to Pasadena nearly nine years ago. Most of the stuff is from his tour of duty in Viet Nam (like a monstrous scrapbook with every letter he wrote his mother while on deployment. His Purple Heart and its certificate. High school yearbooks, letters, notes and cards. What to keep, what to donate, what to toss?

And, lastly, an odd side effect of this process is that I'm going through my things and seeing what's there that I can cull out and release. I'm not being reckless about it, but all the closets in the house are filled with things that I haven't looked at or used, some for more than a decade. And don't even get me thinking about tackling the CD collection: hundreds to go through.

Kittie and David came down again this weekend. Kittie cooked, went through the paperwork we have left to pull all the documents the attorney will need for the probate petition, and helped me clear out and pack Steve's things in the dresser. David untangled an ivy plant from its holder on the patio and helped me build a moss cage in the holder, transplanting the ivy from its small pot into the moss-lined holder.

And it was time with family. It was time with company. It was people filling up the solitude. I know, at some point, the house will fit me and feel like home with just me here, but for now I still suppose I hear Steve upstairs, when it's the cats knocking something over. They're on edge, too, because they know something's going on, and they know they haven't seen Steve for nearly two months.

I keep pointing out the very nice box on the platform in the living room, but I don't think the cats get that what's left of Steve is sitting up with Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary.