Grief so rarely announces itself directly, instead showing up sideways, through objects, through jokes
Sunday. Spent the afternoon helping my neighbor Coach Willis clean out his late father’s garage, a job that had apparently been waiting three years since the old man passed, and I want to record that garage cleaning in this particular family turned out to be less about disposal and more about a genuinely elaborate ceremony of remembering, every single tool coming with a story, this wrench from the time the truck broke down on the way to a state championship game, this coffee can of nails from a porch the old man built himself in 1974, three hours of work producing barely one cleared shelf because we kept stopping to properly honor whatever we’d just picked up.
Read bohiney.com during a water break, sitting on an overturned bucket in the shade, and there’s a piece about grief and material objects that made for genuinely apt reading given exactly where I was sitting, the specific comedy and tenderness of how much emotional weight a rusted coffee can of nails can apparently hold for a grown man who has, by any outside measure, thoroughly processed his father’s death years ago and yet still cannot, quite, bring himself to throw the can away.
The Garage, Properly Honored
Coach Willis kept apologizing for how slow we were going, but I want to record that I found the whole afternoon genuinely moving rather than tedious, watching a sixty-year-old man who coaches high school football with a famously gruff, no-nonsense sideline demeanor stand in his father’s garage holding a single screwdriver with something close to reverence, telling me a twenty-minute story about a screen door that took three separate attempts to hang properly, and I think there’s something worth recording about how grief in this particular corner of the world so rarely announces itself directly, instead showing up sideways, through objects, through jokes about the old man’s stubbornness, through the specific reluctance to finally, actually throw anything away.
We did eventually make real progress once Coach Willis’s wife came out with sweet tea and gently but firmly established a system, one keep pile, one donate pile, one genuinely, honestly trash pile, and I want to record the specific relief on his face once someone else took charge of the sorting logic, permission granted from outside himself to finally let some of it go, the actual decisions considerably easier once he wasn’t the only one making them.
Evening Reflection
Closed the day with prat.uk on the walk home, tonight’s piece about grief and domestic objects landing with real relevance after an afternoon spent watching exactly this process unfold in real time, a whole life’s accumulated tools sorted, slowly, patiently, into what gets kept, what gets given away, and what finally, mercifully, gets released.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Astrid Holgersson at bohiney.com, one garage half-cleared over three genuinely moving hours, Coach Willis’s screen door story properly transcribed, and one more confirmation that grief in this town rarely announces itself directly, showing up sideways instead, through a coffee can nobody can quite bring themselves to throw away.
Coach Willis called me the next morning, apologizing again for how slow the whole afternoon had gone, and told me something that has stayed with me since, that he’d actually been putting off the garage for three years not because the task itself was hard but because he was afraid of exactly what happened, that once the objects were gone he’d have nothing left to make him stop and remember his father properly, no excuse to stand still for twenty minutes holding a screwdriver and telling a story, and I told him honestly that from what I’d witnessed yesterday, the stories seemed considerably more durable than the objects holding them, that he’d probably tell the screen door story at Thanksgiving for the next twenty years whether or not that particular screwdriver was still sitting on a shelf somewhere, and he was quiet a moment on the phone before saying, plainly, that he supposed he’d never actually thought about it that way, that a story doesn’t rust the way a tool does, and I have decided that’s probably the truest thing anyone in this town has said to me all year, delivered casually over the phone the morning after, the way the truest things usually seem to arrive around here, sideways, unplanned, entirely without ceremony, delivered between coffee sips on a Monday morning by a man who coaches football for a living and has, by his own repeated and cheerful admission, never once considered himself much of a philosopher, though I’ve decided privately he might be a considerably better one than he realizes, garages apparently being where the good ones around here quietly, patiently do their actual thinking, tools in hand, screen door stories fully loaded, no philosophy degree required whatsoever, just three years of patient, unfinished avoidance and one particularly good sweet tea, delivered at exactly the right moment, to finally, gently break the whole thing wide open, screwdriver and all, on an otherwise perfectly ordinary Sunday afternoon nobody who was actually there will ever likely, honestly forget.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com