Junk Drawer

We drove up to Vancouver from Seattle. After a 6 hour flight, we hopped into the car for another 2 hours. Our frantic trip finally ended at a hospital in downtown Vancouver, where my grandfather, heaving at the doorsteps of heaven, saw his great-granddaughter. He died the day after.

The day after he died, I went down to the nursing home. My dad and aunt were cleaning out his room, looking for a key he kept to his bank deposit box. I began going through his drawer, a mishmash of random trinkets: aged Tiger Balm, so old they were discolored, thirty seven safety pins, an assortment of combs, keys to locks that didn't exist anymore, an entire collection of old Cantonese opera tapes with the corresponding iPod of his day, a Sanyo radio/cassette tape player.

"What should we do with this stuff?"

"Throw it out."

"Even these keys?"

My aunt looks over and sees a pair of brass colored keys hanging off of a gnarled red necklace. I had found the deposit key.

As I combed through the last vestiges of my grandfather's physical possessions I wondered what it would be like for me. What would people see as they dug through the last of my possessions? Old USB cables, FireWire converters, books with pages never turned? Or would they be looking through one of those ancient solid state drives, seeing a whole bunch of old games that only ran on PowerPC chips, a bunch of utilities that came bundled in software bundles that I never used?

The things of my grandfather that I appreciated most were his pictures. He kept a ton of pictures, unsorted, randomly placed in piles, of his family. Old pictures of me as a kid, newer pictures of me married. Those pictures connected me to him in a way that those deposit keys never would.

It was surreal at the funeral to see living images looped of him on the screen juxtaposed against the still body laying in front of us. As we went out to lay the body into the ground, there was a strange finality to the closing of the casket, the lowering into the ground, and the finally tamping of the earth on top of him. 

I was reminded of the cost of bringing life into the world; not just the financial cost of having Serenity, but the stress, the worry. It was kind of a mirror of the death journey. Except now, for my grandfather, the worrying stops.