Creative Aging: Pangs While Purging

“The Greek word for return is ‘nostos.’ ‘Algos’ means suffering. So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” ― Milan Kundera

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

“Is it time to get rid of this?” my husband Marlo asks. He shows me a memory display box that has been on a garage shelf since we downsized to a duplex three years ago. I made the memory box decades ago, early in our marriage.

He suggests, “We can take the mementos out and donate the box to a thrift store.”

“I suppose,” I sigh. “I don’t plan to display it anywhere.”

Marlo removes the glass from the front of the box, and I pry loose the small mementos.

Two items belong to Marlo: a pocket watch from his grandfather and a high school band medal. Marlo says the band medal can be tossed, but he wants to keep the watch.

The remainder of the items are mine.

I start with a miniature landscape made of a lava rock, a piece of sandstone, and a flat shell that has functioned as a mini-moon. I no longer remember where any of these came from, so I can dispose of them. The same holds true for a miniature crocheted basket, a tiny covered wagon, and an inch-tall spray of silk flowers.

After that, disposal gets harder. A glass squirrel tugs at my heart. It is the only thing left from a huge glass terrarium that we owned in the 1970s during the terrarium fad. An Empire State Building and a Statue of Liberty are from my 1968 spring vacation trip to New York City. A charm bracelet sports a dozen high school medals—speech, debate, honor roll, newspaper staff. . . .

I wonder if it still fits me.

It does.

I put it on my wrist and the metals clank with their familiar jangle from the past. Their weight is familiar too.

I remove more items. My track medals are glued into the memory box separately. They did not fit on the charm bracelet. I decide I can part with those. I identified m ore with academics than athletics.

As I look again at the miniature squirrel and New York buildings, bittersweet nostalgia rises, as it often does when I spend time with treasured mementos from the long-gone past. I decide I can display them on the chest of drawers next to my file cabinet. The squirrel can join the ceramic butterfly already there. The two New York building miniatures can go next to my statue of Peter Stuyvesant.

A marble egg (a gift from a cast of a play I student-directed in college) has discolored over the years. I wonder if it can be made attractive again. I submerge it in bleach water. In the bleach it fades and grows dull. I discard it.

An ornate cross my neighbor created with thin, varnished slices of walnut shells gleam too beautifully to toss. I have several crosses hung above light switches as reminders of Christ. I take a pushpin from the bulletin board above my desk and fasten the cross above my office light switch. Maybe later Marlo can help me hang it from a tiny nail which will be less visible than the pushpin, but this will do for today.

Except for the charm bracelet, the remaining items would just clutter up a drawer. I decide to dispose of them. (Instead of “trashing,” I choose to think of it as “disposing.” It’s a less painful term.)

That leaves the charm bracelet dangling from my wrist. I look at it and I am a high school student again, proudly walking to the front of the auditorium to receive each one of them.

But that was in another life. I am now long past the time when I take ego satisfaction from high school medals. At least I should be.

Perhaps I can wear it occasionally as a reminder of the fleeting nature of time. It can remind me to be present to the moments as they pass. I place it in my jewelry box.

Sorting these mementos, I wonder whatever happened to the items I removed from another memory box—a printer’s drawer—shortly after downsizing to this duplex. I search through several wooden boxes until I find the right one.

As I open it, I remember. When I emptied the printer’s drawer I couldn’t to part with any of them, except for 25 keys to unidentified doors and locks that I had kept in case someday I discovered those keys’ purpose. That someday had never come, so I had disposed of them. The remaining items I put in this box—my silver baby spoon, a Sunday school pin, a piece of coral from Hawaii. . . until I could face parting with them at a future date.

Is today the date? I consider the ache beneath my ribs and the fluttering in my stomach. I close the box.

Parting may be sweet sorrow, but it remains sorrow, nonetheless. And today I have endured all the sorrowing my heart can handle.

Next week I may have the strength to attack the printer’s drawer mementos.

But not today. No, not today.

Adapted from Creative Aging by Carol Van Klompenburg, published 2023, available from Amazon and for Pella-area residents directly from Carol. Carol has an MA in theater arts and is available for reading performances of her writing on aging, moments in her gardens, and other topics.