Some people build Legos. Some people carve 8-foot-tall dragons out of spruce logs. Some write proofs that lay bare the hidden truths of our universe. Others make red bean cakes all day, deftly wrapping each one with glutinous dough. But some people do none of these things, or seemingly any other generative activity besides. And some of those people must have died recently, because there I was, at the most boring estate sale of my life.
The interesting thing – or the thing that is usually interesting – about estate sales is that there is no other circumstance in which it is socially acceptable to walk through the home of a complete stranger, peeking through their closet and rummaging through their drawers, alongside a group of fellow strangers. It's a very quiet affair, and if you've ever been shopping in a non-retail environment you can probably imagine it. It's a bit like a really intrusive version of a yard sale, if the homeowner-turned-storeclerk just turned you loose in their home (and then died, I guess). Add to that the knowledge that the genesis of your shopping trip was a tragedy for someone, and you can imagine that it’s a strange feeling.
But you do get to poke around in a stranger's home, and I think that's kind of cool. Usually the items deemed worthy of being priced and displayed are put out on tables, counters, and dressers for you to peruse, but there's nothing stopping you from opening a cabinet and asking how much they'll sell you the half-empty bottle of Windex for. They're very informal operations, which makes them fun; shopping is a combination of scavenging and bartering. I started going to estate sales because I was tempted by the idea of finding one-of-a-kind treasures, diamonds in the rough – but my curiosity about the lives of other people is what has kept me coming back.
My first estate sale was that of a Hawaiian couple whose kitchen was filled with sunlight and handcrafted pottery. Colorful silk shirts were slung over the banister, yours for $30 each. They would flutter in the breeze like a bouquet of exotic flowers every time someone opened the front door. On the bookshelves were leather-bound Polynesian history books alongside early-childhood parenting manuals (together the couple had two children, now adults). There was a warm, vibrant smell in the air, and two trees outside framed the front window perfectly – perhaps they had been planted there when the house was new. That day I felt a sense of having slipped momentarily into a totally different life, a sense of interloping in someone else's memories. I am aware that I don't really know these people; I had never met any of them, not even their grown-up children. I’m aware that this is empathy in the abstract–love painted with broad strokes–but I'm telling you that it felt very real when I was walking through this house. It's a visceral thing, not easily verbalized. It was blissful in a brand-new way, the bliss of feeling my perspective becoming permanently broadened. I wanted to experience it again.
The next estate sale I went to was that of an elderly man, a diver. Ernest Hemingway, eat your heart out: this was an old man who loved the sea. There were "decorative" fishing nets on more than one wall in the living room, lots of bleached and sprawling coral in shadow boxes, and a whole bucket of shimmering blue abalone shells for just a few dollars each. (One of which has been sitting on my bathroom counter for years now, in case you thought I wasn't going to jump on that abalone assortment.) He also had all kinds of tools, and if there's one truly unexpected thing I've learned about estate sales, it's this: if there is any mention of a well-stocked tool shed or garage in the listing, a swarm of dads who are physically identifiable as Dodge Ram drivers will descend upon that sale like balding, beer-bellied locusts.
At estate sales, the demographics are usually split about 50/50 between two groups. There are the resellers, who are determined and efficient buyers with the economies of scale to do things like–for example–scoop up an entire collection of Navajo sterling silver jewelry before anyone else gets a chance to buy a single thing for themselves, not even one very sweet and polite customer who has never done a single bad thing in her entire life and who fell completely in love with a particular labradorite necklace before she realized the "SOLD" sticker applied to the entire display(!) because a professional reseller bought the whole thing as soon as the sale opened at 9am. (Yes, reader, you are indeed sensing the presence of a personal grudge. Pardon my momentary loss of composure.) But you get the idea. Then there are people like me: usually women of a surprisingly wide range of ages–men at estate sales are almost always accompanying their wives, and if not then they are there on her behalf, showing her on FaceTime the kitchen table she spotted in the online listing, it's true–but anyway, I like to think that a good portion of us are there out of a sense of curiosity, or a knack for treasure hunting, or a willingness to go to great lengths in pursuit of a rare collectible... but I think usually we just want some new ramekins. Mostly we are just wandering and pondering, pausing here and there for a decorative basket or some cool mismatched cups. There are the older ladies who walk around arm-in-arm with their chatty church friends, squeezing down the narrow hallways to the bedroom closet where the yarn, fabric, and quilts are usually stashed. There are the introspective younger women, the ones who I sense are there for reasons similar to my own, who take their time thumbing through boxes of records, who admire the silk dresses and feel the fabric. There are also sometimes these weirdly pragmatic tight-mouthed married couples who do things like ask "how much for this entire stack of printer paper" and then go to www.officemax.com on their phone to see if $5 is a good price for that much paper while their significant other stands there with their arms crossed and evaluates the condition of the paper stack. I try to feel neutral about these people, but something about taking an estate sale that seriously is kind of off-putting to me. That's a dead guy's printer paper, and I don't think OfficeMax even sells that. Who can say what it's worth? Well, dear reader, I think I (we?) have just now determined that bargain hunting for office supplies at estate sales is kind of weird, and that this behavior should be forbidden or at least rebuked.*
A/N: *Unless it turns out that they were buying school supplies for a disabled orphan school and they had a tight budget due to funding issues, so they resorted to estate sales – I would feel like a real asshole for rebuking an underfunded school for disabled orphans. You’d hope something like that would be funded pretty well. But I think most likely this is not the case, and those people are just uptight freaks. (The printer paper people, not the disabled orphans.)
Back to the swarm of dads: there was a dad swarm descending upon that estate sale because of all the tools. Honestly, I shouldn't have been so rude earlier when I was talking about them because a.) I agree that tools from back in the day really were built to last and they really don't make them like they used to, dads are unironically so right about that – to hell with planned obsolescence, and b.) they're actually very polite shoppers. They will offer to help you carry things to your car if they see that you're struggling, and they suck in their dad bellies when you have to scoot past them in the hallway. And that's another thing about estate sales: when a lot of people show up, the experience can become very anxiety-inducing. You might not have ever considered retail design while shopping before, but let me tell you that being at a crowded estate sale will make you appreciate it. The problem is that houses are designed to be houses, not stores, so having more than about a dozen people roaming around in a residential home presents some logistical quandaries – like when one person is awkwardly trying to carry a big chair to the front so they can buy it while someone else is trying to plug in a toaster so they can see if it works, but they're doing it in the hallway for some reason, so the chair person has to step over the toaster person without dropping the chair or tripping over the toaster cord. You get the idea – there’s lots of chaos going on, and you're always a little scared someone's gonna bump into you while you're holding an heirloom vase or something. This second estate sale experience was mostly like that; I spent a lot of time squeezing past people who were not stoked to be in the way in the first place but they really wanted to look at the sailboat painting that's right there. But then the thing is that once you do get past them, you find yourself looking up at the sailboat painting, and damn, it really is quite lovely, and then before you know it you’re the one in someone else’s way, and you’re not stoked about it either (because no one wants to be the inconveniencer or the inconveniencee), but then you both stand there and admire the sailboat painting for a moment and it’s kind of nice. But other than that, this was shaping up to be a distinctly un-peaceful and not-transcendent estate sale experience, especially compared to the sun-drenched Polynesian bliss of my previous one.
But fear not! I still picked out some really neat stuff, and at some point I began noticing that it was actually sort of sweet to see people push past each other, reach and vie to see what’s on the top shelves, and wait in a long, slow checkout line... all because this guy had collected such powerfully cool stuff. By the end of his life he had accumulated such a valuable and representational corpus of physical items that it had to send itself off in all directions to be cherished by others, like a wave crashing back into the ocean, dispersed and transmuted. These things that were once his had now become, in some minute but tangible way, him. And if that's even a little true, then it’s also true that people love him: they're ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the hefty build of his German wrench--maybe the one that was his favorite in life--and then someone notices that actually he has every single size of that wrench over here and the dad swarm rushes over to see, and now someone else is appreciating that he kept his workbench in such pristine condition, see how he even maintained the insides of the drawers? "This guy really knew what he was doing when it came to fishing too, look at this tackle box, I’ve never seen anything like it." And don't forget that he was a diver; he had tons of seashell-based home decor and a collection of driftwood furniture (perhaps homemade with the aforementioned tools) that the ladies were going nuts over in the living room. Everyone loved this guy's stuff, myself included. The crowd stopped being stressful for me after that, and it became a different experience: I realized that it was my first time being part of something like this. The best way I can describe it is a collective sense of interest and enthusiasm for another person's--a stranger's--personal physical reality. Again I found myself feeling a brand new emotion. In lovingly crafting his collection, this old passionate diver had given us a way to meet him after his death. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity. Estate sales were challenging me to a game of astonishment hardball, and the score presently sat at Estate Sales: 2, Kyra: 0.
Now we arrive at what is arguably my most interesting estate sale story to date. I'll try to tell it quickly because I still haven't gotten to the really boring one, the one that occasioned this whole essay in the first place, and now as I write this I’m thinking, Kyra, why would you rush through the most interesting story to get to the most boring one, I don’t think that makes any sense at all, and maybe I’m right. But the truth is that I’ve already gone on several tangents, and this story doesn't really have much to do with the overall narrative here; it’s just so unbelievable that I have to include it. You deserve to be entertained since you stuck with me through all that waffling earlier, my dear patient reader. So I'll just tell you the quick version.
A/N: This section contains mentions of violence and domestic abuse. If you want to avoid these topics, please skip this section. I bet you didn’t think there would be a true crime segment of this essay, but you were wrong! I like to keep you on your toes around here. But not too much. And don’t worry, I’ll meet you on the other side. When you see this symbol again you’ll know it’s safe:
✾
Our story starts about a year and a half ago, when I came across a listing for an estate sale that would be occurring that same weekend in an area very close to where I lived. The pictures were promising; the home and its contents appeared much more contemporary and high-end than the average estate sale, which is usually old people stuff. This looked like young people stuff, and I was intrigued. It looked like there was a lot of audio equipment for sale, so I invited my music producer friend to join me. When the day came, we met up bright and early at 9am and parked down the street from the house, which was a nice house in a nice part of town. We waited in the driveway for our turn to enter (to combat the aforementioned hallway traffic jams, there is a strict one-in-one-out policy once max capacity is reached), but the line was moving slowly, so I pulled up the listing on my phone and we began to chat about the things we wanted to check out once we got inside. As we looked through the pictures of items for sale, something familiar caught my attention: affixed to one of the items was a small sticker bearing the logo of a local art collective that I had collaborated with. A flurry of questions kicked up in my mind. Usually I’m more or less unburdened by the emotional weight of estate sales; I don’t really tend to hang out with old people, and at the time of this writing have been fortunate to not have had much tragedy in my life. Estate sales for me belonged to an abstract realm of hospice care and retirement homes, a realm in which I was solidly a visitor. Elderly folks whom I had never met but who were loved and cared for by their families, peacefully departing when it was their time: that’s how I squared the undercurrent of tragedy. So I was flustered by this spilling-over, this edge-bleed between two parallel but separate realities. It made me uncomfortable. How did this holographic sticker that I had only seen on pulsating dance floors make its way into this realm, one usually occupied by oxygen tanks and dusty eyeglass cases, a realm which had previously never existed in the same timeline as the former?
While I didn’t know everyone in the art collective personally, I knew that everyone who was part of the group was quite young (it was a small group, and very tight-knit), and I hadn’t heard about any deaths among the artists nor any collaborators. I was active on social media at the time and the news would have made its way to me, surely. I remember thinking that maybe someone involved with the collective had been living with an older relative, and when that relative passed they just took the opportunity to sell some of their own belongings too? But the thought that I could be about to step into the home of someone I’d met, maybe even worked alongside, and who no longer exists, of whose death I was callously unaware… Was I about to wander through the bedroom of a recently deceased acquaintance, the ghost of a ghost? Someone I met in passing, now passed – would I come to know them in some macabre role-reversal, some posthumous perversion of friendship, having only taken the time to understand them after their death? I Googled it.
The address of the house is what I looked up, actually; I just typed it straight into Google and hit “enter.” The first result was a police report with that exact address in the headline. The second result was an article about a murder-suicide. My heart was pounding at this point, and I leaned over to my friend and showed him what I was seeing. “No way,” was all he could say, his eyes glued to the screen as he read. We opened the news report, and there it was: A young couple in their 30s had lived at this address. Sadly, there was violence between them, as evidenced by several prior police reports. Eventually there was a murder-suicide. The man had shot his girlfriend then turned the gun on himself, all in a matter of moments. And this took place mere months prior to the moment where we now find ourselves, in the driveway of the home where this unimaginable tragedy unfolded, about to waltz in and start rummaging through this violent murderer’s box of charging cables, which are reasonably priced at $3 each. (I did buy one or two. I like to jokingly give my guests a “murder charge” when they borrow one of those cables to charge their phone. I don't know if that's funny or not.)
My friend and I were speechless. Then I remembered that I might know the guy, or at least know someone who knows him, and it turned out that I did. I looked up his name, the one I found in the police report. I scoured Instagram, and tracked down his profile after a little sleuthing. The audio equipment visible in the background of his posts matched the stuff in the house we were about to enter, and his last photo was posted mere days prior to his final act. (We did, in fact, have mutual followers – but I’ll get to that later.) Upon entering the house, my friend and I both noticed that two large portions of the original hardwood floor – about 3ft wide squared-off areas on opposite sides of the entryway – had been hastily torn up and replaced with construction plywood. (I admit I scrutinized these areas to see if I could spot any errant blood spatter, which in hindsight is macabre and a little insensitive. Who do I think I am, Sherlock Holmes?) In the living room I spotted a handful of books about anger management and self-help guides on how to save a failing relationship – books that were directly in line with the antique muskets mounted over the sofa. My friend met my gaze knowingly: it was a haunting juxtaposition. I silently wondered if anyone else was aware of the grisly reality hidden in plain sight. I bought his iPod Shuffle.
I don’t recall ever meeting the guy, but we did have a few mutual followers on Instagram. Later on, I reached out to one of my friends from the collective who had known him. They were shocked to learn of the murder-suicide; it was the first they’d heard of it. They told me they had only a vague memory of the guy, and no recollection of the woman, his victim (I found her Instagram profile too, but it was set to private). My friend informed me that the guy had mostly kept to himself and never got too friendly with anyone. “He seemed like kind of a weird dude,” I remember him saying, “but I didn’t think he was crazy.”
In truth, I was deeply unsettled by the whole experience. I stayed awake the following night, restlessly wringing all the information I could from social media. I pored over everything that had been written about the deceased, every single obituary and Instagram tribute. Maybe you think it’s a little intrusive that I did so–and maybe it is–but I think I just wanted to find something that would close the open loop in my mind. But the truth is that sometimes there aren’t any answers at all. Senseless tragedy is just that; it’s impossible to make sense of. Sometimes we just have to accept the mystery and find a way to live with it.
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Now onto the boring story. (Aren’t you excited?) I’ll try to make it not-boring, so that we might transmute an uninteresting experience into an interesting story. We’ll attempt a bit of alchemy here, you and I.
The scene is set: it’s the first sunny day after a long winter, maybe not quite spring yet but at least a springtime aperitif, an amuse bouche of warm weather to come, and it’s so welcome that no one really even cares if it’ll be winter again tomorrow – we’re just happy the sun is out today. I’m driving through gently rolling hills on my way home from a small town about an hour outside of the city, where I had gone to pick up a gently used rug from a Facebook Marketplace seller. (If you must know, it was a cute circular rug for a heck of a bargain, and it looks beautiful under my dining table.) I’m in an indomitable mood. Sunlight is pouring in through my windows and music is pouring out, nice and loud, and I’m singing along. It’s like a photosynthetic call-and-response with the open road, and I’m loving it. I’m also gently stoned, just the perfect amount. Out of the corner of my sunglassed eye I spy a sign that says “ESTATE SALE →,” and after that I must have entered a fugue state because the next thing I knew I was inside a home which I will describe presently.
A/N: I didn’t actually enter a fugue state to get to the estate sale, I just kind of pulled over and did a three-point turn in the middle of an empty intersection, which was not dangerous per se but was definitely stressful. I think it’s more fun to imagine being swept into an estate sale in some kind of trance. But rest assured that I do not experience fugue states, and if I did I would not operate a motor vehicle while in Fugue Mode. At least, I would try my best not to – but I can’t be sure that my better judgment would prevail if I was truly fugued up.
Listen, so far you’ve been regaled by my more noteworthy estate-sale-related stories, but be aware that in between the thrilling tales you’ve heard have been a smattering of unremarkable experiences. From those experiences, I’ve learned that most Baby Boomers and almost all Silent Generation-ers(?) have amassed a collection of some kind. Which you’d think is really cool, right? Personally I am fascinated by quirky collectors of some niche item, and really who isn’t charmed by that kind of single-minded passion? But alas, most of these collections turn out to be extremely uninteresting. It’s usually either Coca-Cola memorabilia or model trains for the men, and as for the ladies, I have noticed a staggering ubiquity of collectible ceramic figurines. You know the ones I’m talking about: there are the religious ones, the little porcelain cherubs praying under a cross, a silhouette of an angel protecting a smaller angel, etc.; then there are the utopian Americana depictions of little white children pushing each other in wagons or playing fetch with a golden puppy, the kind of derivative nostalgia-bait that plays chicken with a lawsuit from Norman Rockwell’s estate. These are the kind of collectibles that would be stocked at local gift shops, back when those existed – I imagine that if you were a Southern meemaw, you might go there after after-church lunch with the girls to see if they had gotten any new figurines in, and if they had you’d buy two and put one on the mantel and gift the matching one to your granddaughter because it’s just so darn cute.
Now, the whole concept of “collectibles” as a product category is something I don’t think I like, but that’s another story. The point is that these collections, though deeply uninteresting to me, are meaningful to the collectors. That’s all they need to be, of course, and I wouldn’t want anyone to collect for any other reason. My issue is not with boring collections but with a complete lack of any collection at all, which is the reality I was confronted with at this particular sale. Usually there is some kind of display: plates, trophies, something. Not here. This was the sort of vibe that people probably imagine when all they know about estate sales is that they are essentially just a postmortem open house with a little commerce thrown in. It felt like a house which death had recently visited, no doubt about it – but I got the feeling that its inhabitants were dead long before they took their last breath.
Okay, that was melodramatic, so let me explain. Not only were there no displays with no collections, there were no books on the shelves that were unexpected choices, or which said anything at all about their owners. Every choice was safe; every one of the vinyl records and cassettes was typical of the era and area (in the southern U.S., this meant exclusively country and worship music). At a certain point I stopped shopping for things and started “shopping” for some kind of evidence of who these people were. Everywhere I looked, things were normal and expected. There were no musical instruments, no art supplies, no tools in the toolbox beyond the standard fare – forget about a hefty German wrench. And most baffling of all: no art on the walls. In case you were wondering if things had been sold or moved off the property before I got there, don’t: they had not. I was there at the beginning of the sale and was told that the family removed pretty much nothing beforehand, save for a few small keepsakes. My anxieties were twofold: on one hand, I recoiled at the idea of being so completely entrenched in one’s local cultural mores that no trace of individuality is left behind, and on the other hand I was scared of falling into that particular brand of cynicism that educated urban types tend to have about neighborhood-dwelling Christian folks. Even though we don’t like to admit it, we city liberals can be just as guilty as the Fox News crowd of stereotyping the other side. Basically, I was afraid that these people were deeply boring, and I was also afraid of allowing myself to think that these people were deeply boring. A bit of a Moorean conundrum, no?
In the interest of balance, let’s take a detour all the way back to 1971. At the height of this domestic golden age of cross-stitch and Pyrex, a book called “The Hidden Art of Homemaking” was published (to much fanfare from the Christian Patriarchy movement, yeesh). The author Edith Schaeffer, herself a deeply religious homemaker from Pennsylvania, beautifully extols the virtues of domestic creativity. The book–which I found nestled among various versions of the Bible on the bookshelf at this estate sale, by the way–has clear overtones of piety and subservience, but it also celebrates the homebound beauty that people (read: women) can create for their families. I found this to be a standout sentiment:
“It is true that all men are created in the image of God, but Christians are supposed to be conscious of that fact, and being conscious of it should recognize the importance of living artistically, aesthetically, and creatively, as creative creatures of the Creator. If we have been created in the image of an Artist, then we should look for expressions of artistry, and be sensitive to beauty, responsive to what has been created for us” (p. 32).
What Edith and I are trying to tell you is that there is more nuance to mid-century domesticity than we tend to give it credit for. I suspect that there has been some cultural ret-conning of the “50’s housewife” trope, such that we may be devaluing the potential beauty of such an existence. The reality is that these women weren’t tropes; they weren’t brainwashed Stepford wives making pot roasts for their alcoholic husbands while high on Klonopin. (Well, not all of them.) I’m not going to try to unpack the rampant sexism of the time, because that’s someone else’s job. What I am going to do is imagine what it might have felt like to start every day by kissing my children good morning and having enough time to make them a delicious breakfast – maybe there’s already a few strips of bacon sizzling on the stove – and because America had such a strong social safety net at the time, your household could support itself on one income. As a homemaker, you would have had plenty of time to spend with your children while their dad was at work, and plenty of time to look after them well. You could get involved with their school, learn crafts with them, spend the afternoon running errands so you can be present with your family in the evening when everyone is gathered around the gas-log fireplace. Like all of us, these women had inner lives and personal experiences of beauty all their own: maybe it was putting on their makeup just the way they liked it or pushing a nickel into the jukebox to play their favorite song. They laughed, cried, picked up new hobbies, and improved their skills when they could. I’m not saying it would be my personal heaven, but for some women I imagine this would be a genuinely meaningful life, maybe the only one they would ever want.
Sadly, there is often little in the way of archaeological evidence of the kind of creativity these women displayed, the kind that involves mostly ephemeral labors of love like hamburger casseroles or hand-sewn mittens that get worn threadbare. A mother’s love leaves an indelible fossil-print in the heart of her child, but that can’t be excavated for obvious reasons. Occasionally, though, there is transcendence in homecraft. Recipes, for example, are a beautiful way in which we can engage with distant relatives; we can repeat the same processes and enjoy the same flavorful meals as someone who died long ago. It’s almost like they are reaching through time to serve you that bowl of Italian wedding soup. But I digress.
I guess what I’m saying is that folk art is art and domestic craft is craft; they’re just less readily conceptualized as such because they exist in the real world rather than some austere gallery in Brooklyn full of turtlenecked yuppies (just kidding, I love you yuppies). But lovingly home-cooked meals are no less valuable for having disappeared into hungry bellies – that’s what they’re supposed to do! And a singular cross-stitched potholder has more artistic value than an entire collection of NFTs any day of the week (I will die on that hill). I’ll take the Non-Fungible Tchotchkes, thanks. Basically, it’s very possible that a meaningful creative output did take place in this home, just beyond the purview of any historical record and therefore beyond the pur-view of my eyeballs.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a very curious person. So, armed with the nuances I’ve just described and determined to find some humanity in these people, I set about looking into who they were. By looking up the address of the estate sale on WhitePages I was able to find the names of the deceased, and from there I found obituaries. Bill, the head of the household, had passed away in 2018. His wife Mary was the only one left in the home, and she died in November of last year (I am writing this in early February). She was, in fact, a homemaker, and together with Bill raised four daughters. She was active in her church and loved crossword puzzles. I’m sure they were truly lovely people, even if their stuff didn’t impress me.
Look, the reality is that no one owes me, or anyone, an interesting estate sale. Who am I to walk into someone’s home and decide that the physical record of their existence is not satisfactory to me? But alas, being a writer, I am doomed to have an opinion on this sort of thing. So here it is: If our last death happens the last time someone utters our name, then one way to achieve immortality is to be transcendently cool. There’s no harm in not leaving behind a bunch of cool stuff – you’ll be dead anyway, why would you care – but it's nice to give people an opportunity to get to know you in your absence. I sure appreciate it, anyway. But on the other hand, if Bill and Mary hadn’t been so boring, I might never have fully appreciated how special that opportunity is. And really, I feel I still got to know them; they just made me work a little harder for it.
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I’ve always felt that to truly love a person is to meet many different versions of them, and to try your best to love those versions too, even if the love that person might need in the future is different – even if the love they need doesn’t really involve you at all. Love is not selfish, and it’s not static; it must be able to persist over time and even transcend death. Love has the power to do that sort of thing, and it can do so with ease. It allows us to expand the borders of our own consciousness: in a way, when we walk through someone’s home, hold their belongings, consider how it felt to live as they did, even for a moment – we are meeting them, we are reaching through time and space to shake their hand. True, the version of them we are meeting might happen to be dead, but our best way of communing with the dead–as with the living–is simply to meet them on their own terms, and to be present with them, and to listen to what they tell us. Smelling the basil in their garden, take a moment to appreciate their green thumb. Imagine what they might have felt while kneeling in their garden and smoothing soil over the tiny ovals of those basil seeds, full of promise. That feeling they held so dear is now kept alive by you, in a tiny museum the shape of your heart. Love is easy – it’s just awareness. When we pay careful attention to someone’s material reality, the objects they use, their life through their eyes; in a very real way, we are loving them. Even if they are a murderer, or worse: deeply boring.
And maybe the real diamonds in the rough were the dead friends we made along the way.
❈
This essay is dedicated to Bill and Mary; maybe we can help them achieve immortality this way.
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