At the bottom of the box
Yanko died in 2010. If he hadn’t, he’d be 102 years old. Whatever your theory of heaven and hell and the conservation of energy, it’s not a tragedy that he’s not here now. Most of us don’t want immortality, not even for ourselves. Unless it’s really harps and golden palaces and the constant warm hum of well-being. Anyway, Yanko’s gone—except for the small parts of him that glow amber in a few scattered human hearts.
Karen flew up to Cleveland when it became apparent Yanko was at the end. Under any circumstances it would have been a stressful trip, but it was further complicated because she’d just begun a job that involved running a website that needed to be constantly updated. Karen did not feel like she could just take off work for several days, leaving the new website in the hands of someone who was not only unfamiliar with the style and tone she had established for the site but would have to find odd minutes throughout the day to update it while doing the full-time job they’d been hired to do.
So Karen decided she would just work remotely, that she could sit in airports or in Yanko’s hospital room and do the little things she needed to do to keep the website running smoothly while he snoozed or in the evenings when she’d be staying at the house Yanko would never come home to.
But, though it seems strange to think it, nine years ago Wi-Fi was not ubiquitous; most travelers accessed the Internet via little dongle modems that plugged into the USB port of their laptops. And Karen was between dongles at the time. Which meant we had to buy one.
Brainac that I am, I undertook to research and procure such a dongle. I found the best deal at a chirpy storefront wireless provider that specialized in low-cost, pay-as-you-go Internet access. I explained the situation to the polo-shirted young man behind the counter, who said they had a product to meet our needs, so I walked across the parking lot and crossed Markham Street to an ATM to get the cash they required to hand over the dongle. (They would not accept a credit or debit card. This was nine years ago.)
Karen checked out the dongle while she was packing for her flight and it worked fine. But when she disembarked in Newark to catch a connecting flight to Cleveland, it didn’t. And when she landed in Cleveland it didn’t. So she ended up limping along on the hospital’s weak Wi-Fi while Yanko slept. (A few months and many phone calls and email messages later I would receive a full refund from the chirpy wireless company. A high-ranking executive apologized that we had “been sold a product that didn’t exist” — their dongles only worked in the area in which they’d been sold. They were useless outside a 50-mile radius from where they’d been purchased.)
After Yanko died, Karen and her sister Barbara divvied up the responsibilities. Karen would begin to clean out Yanko’s house while Barb would handle the funeral arrangements and sort out the immediate legal and financial issues. While the sisters mutually agreed who would handle what, I’m not sure it was the best division of labor. Karen is ruthlessly unsentimental, quick and firm in her decisions. She is distressed by clutter.
Yanko was never a slob, his house was always tidy. But he kept things. Karen found six unopened bottles of Heinz vinegar from 1982. Out. She found her mother’s 25-year-old makeup. She found Yanko’s Army discharge papers. She remembers Yanko told her to look in the inside
pocket of his blue blazer, where he keeps his “mad money.”
She found $400.
She scrubbed and cleaned, she threw things out. She washed old clothes and folded them for the Goodwill. A long way away I worry that she might be getting rid of things she might later want. She came home, exhausted. Yanko’s house sat on the market for 14 months. Finally it sold. Karen will most likely never set foot inside it again.
Life moves on.
A week or two ago Barb sent Karen a package, 30 pounds compacted in a cube; photos and documents and publications, a core sampling of a life distilled from the things Karen didn’t pack up for charity or throw away.
It sits on her desk for a couple of days because she knows that after she opens it she will spend hours sorting through whatever she finds inside. It will require at least a free afternoon. I have been known to rip open packages before bringing them inside the house. I don’t know where she gets the patience.
Finally, she takes a knife and carefully cuts through the tape and pulls back the flaps and starts to remove the layers of tissue and wadded paper. She finds pounds of papers, dozens of photographs of half-forgotten family friends reframed (!) by Barb at not inconsiderable expense. A few loose photographs, including a portrait of Karen’s mother that’s been carefully scissored out of some larger group photo. (That’s how we used to defriend folks.) A couple of high school yearbooks to be sucked back into.
I’ll scan the photos; we might repurpose the frames. She’s glad to have the yearbooks. It was a nice sisterly gesture. I save some of the packing material and take some out to the recycling.
Afew hours later I notice the house is quiet and I’m not really doing anything productive, just tinkering, moving commas around, so I shut down the file and go downstairs and find her in the chair in our bedroom, sitting on her feet like a teenager, beside the six-inch stack of envelopes she found at the bottom of the box.
It’s her letters home; the oldest ones she sent her parents 40 years ago when she first arrived in this strange, wild and not-quite-Southern place where she still lives. They are letters from an earnest, dutiful child who is saving her money, making her way, checking the boxes of young adulthood. Some of them were accompanied by newspaper clippings with modest little messages scribbled in the margins: “One of the stories I’ve written.”
What’s most remarkable is the cursive penmanship, the fluid, rhythmic flow of blue ink. This is how we used to communicate, before long distance calls were cheap and email made us lazy. We didn’t dream it. We used to write letters.
And people who loved us used to save them in shoe boxes.