Ruthless

Goodbye to those funeral shoes

We are moving and the act of throwing things out feels therapeutic, and a bit aggressive.

Here is a list of what went into the trash this week:

1. The shoes I wore to his funeral. 10 years beaten down. Soles worn. Peeling. For years I’ve been trying to replace them but have yet to find the right pair or have wanted to spend the money. But the other night, I just threw them in the trash. The only ceremony around it was the fantasy of them being gone.

2. The wine bottle-turned-candle holder with a label that said “2020 is cancelled.” I had almost perfected that colorful wax down the side look and imagined using it 15 years from now with a sense of nostalgia. I thought my kid might ask me why I kept it and I could explain the capsule of loneliness that was that year. But, goodbye to that. Saving items to be artifacts in a later chapter of life has to be kept in check.

3. The candle holder from my first wedding. It’s really just an old glass jar with some ribbon around it. But I remember Danuta, my fierce first mother-in-law whose death still feels raw, instructing my friends how to glue the lace ribbon exactly. Throwing out remnants of a wedding when your husband has died feels sacrilege, but also freeing.

Then there are the old t-shirts that need to go, perfectly soft but riddled with holes. And the underwear and socks that are still usable, but certainly don’t make me feel good. There are the chipped bowls and mugs. So much excess. And the piece of art I bought from an old man at a crafts fair. There are the books and records that are just for looks and not consumption, the mostly used adult coloring books, and the dried up flowers that hold deep sentimental value but will crumble if they are forced into a new home.

My general rule when I move is that I only take the stuff I love. But this move is happening fast and we have a 6-month-old to take care of and careers to tend to, so ruthless it is. Maybe I’ll have time for nostalgia again when the kiddo goes to school.

But I can’t help myself and find myself annotating it all. So I want to write a little bit more about those funeral shoes.

Sometime in the days between Sergiusz dying and the funeral, my mom and I went to the mall to buy something to wear. That’s when I got these shoes. They were slim black boots with a chunky heel and much nicer than the worn-in Converse Chucks I usually wore. I put on these funeral shoes for the first time on that sad day. And then over the years that followed I wore them while public speaking, to countless parties, and on way too many first dates. But there is one memory that stands out, from about a month after I was widowed. It was a Tuesday evening in October 2016 and I was going to teach again for the first time. I walked into the synagogue where I would share my grandmother’s story and can still hear the shoes click-clacking down the hallway. The sound was deafening to my grief-ridden body. My mother was with me because I was still too scared to be alone at that time. But the core memory, the one I hold tight, is when I came home to my parent’s house where I had been staying since the night Sergiusz died. I remember my father hugging me and commenting that I was a real professional now. I was doing my job even when I felt unable. It was a moment of softness and the compliment settled inside of me. I still hold those words of empowerment close and lean on them when life feels hard. For some reason, those shoes remind me of that moment. I’ll miss having that memory in my closet.