My house is packed with portkeys. The portkey is a very simple travelling device in Harry Potter, being an everyday object that has been enchanted to instantly bring anyone who touches it to a specific destination. Using a portkey is described as like having a hook “somewhere behind the navel” pulling the traveller to their destination. No disrespect intended, but the portkeys in my home are so much more powerful than anything from JK Rowling’s imagination.
Simply seeing one of Helen’s possessions takes me on a journey, one that takes me to happier times, places and people. Far from operating behind the navel, they tear at my body and spirit in multiple daily reminders of loss.
The subject of what to do with Helen’s belongings has been one where I’ve been in receive mode from friends and family for some time: “Clear everything to help you move on”; “Don’t clear too much as you’ll regret it later”; “Involve the kids in what to keep”; “Don’t inflict clearing their mum’s stuff on the kids”; “Do it now”; “Do it next year”; “Don’t do it”. So that’s all clear, then.
I’m standing in front of a wardrobe full of Helen’s clothes. Running my hands over their fabrics and textures is like a download of who Helen was, her life stages and passions. I love it. I hate it. I shut the door and shut my mind to it for another week, having dealt already with the random objects of the bedroom – the combs, glasses, makeup etc – and felt better for it, but this is so much. Too much.
Every one of Helen’s belongings is an expression of her conscious mind’s choices and tastes. Some of them, like her coat and hats, still smell of her and to me are more Helen than the ashes I’m so studiously avoiding having anything to do with.
I spin the time-turner on my own memories. I’m eight and can picture my mother standing beside a drawer in her bedroom – “Dad’s drawer”. In it sat those objects, which she’d salvaged after his death in 1968. “I kept your dad’s watch, cufflinks, ring, electric razor and a few other bits and pieces for you, Roger and Richard to cherish when you grow up.”
Later, years later, I was given the cufflinks, Roger the watch and Richard the ring, which was great but I remember so clearly when no one was around, going through the drawer’s contents item by item, time after time, year after year. To me, with so little (no) memory of my dad, he was summed up by his gold jewellery, glasses, handkerchiefs, golf club membership and, rather surprisingly (as I look back now), a membership card for the Playboy Club in London.
Would I really want Helen to be summed up for the kids in some random objects that she might have binned at any time?
Nor do I ever want to repeat the scene in which having given some of my effortlessly stylish late mother’s outfits to charity, I saw one of them walking towards me on the seafront with a different, younger and attractive face on top. Head-melting stuff.
My friend Pete provides a counterpoint to my angst. “Adam, you’re over-intellectualising this. Confucius say get some boxes and stick the whole lot in the fucking loft and park it there for a few years. The kids matter, not stuff.”
Bullseye, Pete.
So I order 20 large plastic boxes and it all goes into the loft. This leaves a few big life-affirming positives in play – paintings, pictures, ornaments, photos and not least Millie and Matt themselves as enriching reminders of a life and love lost.
No doubt when I die all the boxes of Helen’s stuff will be unpacked by them both, hopefully not as testimony to my indecision and Pete’s wisdom but as exhibits of their dad’s love for their mum that belie the daft, incontinent, grumpy old bastard I’d become. Circle of life or what?
Adam Golightly is a pseudonym
