He really hated the smell of gun oil. Which is odd for a career soldier. Sort of like going Airborne when you’re afraid of heights. He was quite aware of the irony but really wasn’t in the mood to appreciate the humor. He weighed the two pistols in his hands. The M1911 was his first service sidearm, so there was a certain emotional attachment there and he’d always liked the .45’s power. On the other hand (literally) the M9 was newer, better engineered, and the one time he’d had occasion to use it he was grateful for the extra bullets available to the 9mm. He had a nephew who would admire the sleekness of it and place stock in the fact it had been carried into battle. He set it aside and settled the .45 into a proper grip. It felt like shaking hands with an old friend. That settled it. He placed the 9mm into its carrying case and fixed a label with the nephew’s name on the outside and secured it in the gun cabinet, where all the other weapons already had labels. Even the cabinet itself was sporting a new label.
Döstädning: Swedish for “Death Cleaning”. It was a system of decluttering and reordering with an eye toward one’s own mortality. He’d stumbled across the concept awhile back and he taken to it right away. It suited a soldier’s mindset perfectly. It wasn’t exactly morbid; death was a factor to be considered, but not the center to be obsessed over. He thought of it more as just a sensible way of going about things, like wills and advance directives. Why leave others to have to deal with all his crap?
And boy was there a lot of crap. Even with moving every couple of years and necessarily leaving big stuff behind, a couple can accumulate a lot of junk over thirty years. His wife indulged him, at least at first. It was one more thing they could do together so she made a sort of game of it. “Whoops! That’s gotta go; Aunt Carolyn simply wouldn’t understand!” and “Do you really think that’ll fit in the coffin?” Then life intervened, as it always does. Priorities shifted, retirement came for him, a great job came for her, and he found himself working “The Project” more and more by himself. A small (and infrequently acknowledged) part of him was mildly annoyed. To be fair, most of the junk was hers, he having developed the habit of travelling light while still an undergrad. (“The Dufflebag Lifestyle” he called it.) But he kept the peace and focused on his stuff and never trashed hers without respectful consultation.
Then she died.
It was unexpected and mercifully quick with little pain. She still knew him at the end and for that he was grateful. Mostly due to his chosen profession plus a bit of an age difference, he’d always assumed that he’d leave her a widow and planned accordingly, if not always consciously. They’d done all the responsible things that grownups do to prepare for such eventualities. But her leaving first hit him like some carefully laid plan had been upset and emotionally he wasn’t prepared –as if he could be—and resented it. At least he was ashamed of it.
But duty was duty and he could take refuge in duty. First he took care of the necessities, then he attended to the niceties. He’d been to many funerals –too many— but planning and presiding over one was harder than it looked. He endured the condolences and endless casseroles with what he hoped was graciousness and looked forward to it all being over. Eventually, it was.
He found himself with an empty, blissfully quiet, no-schedule weekend. It might have actually been the middle of the week but he wasn’t tracking the specific days all that closely just yet. It felt like a weekend. Why wouldn’t it, to a comfortably retired widower? He vaguely wondered if the rest of his life would feel like an empty weekend. He polished off the last of the casseroles (unheated) for breakfast and faced the day with something akin to resignation.
He spent the morning haunting his own house, going from room to room, touching things as if taking inventory, and trying not to think too much. Furniture, appliances, books –lots of books—with adjacent libraries of music and movies. He drifted by his workbench, noting the remains of unfinished projects that now held zero interest. In the den, he swiped a finger of dust off his guitar and another off her double bass. Dust? Has it really been that long? In the master bedroom he sat awhile on the gigantic bed that dominated the room. (It was their first piece of non-government-issued furniture for their first very own house so they went all out.) It wasn’t until he opened her closet –Jesus, she’s got a lot of shoes!—that he remembered “The Project”.
He returned to it like a man clutching a life raft.
The time that followed was mainly one of sorting. The first sort was a simple “STAY or GO”? Local charities did well for a couple of weeks. Donating her clothes (including all those damned shoes) was oddly difficult. He had no use for them; others might. You’d think pragmatism would carry the day. You’d be wrong. He was astonished to discover he could smell her on her clothes. Not her perfume –her. He eventually solved the problem by outsourcing it to a sympathetic sister while he studiously attended to other matters far away from the house. He would rather berate himself for a coward than feel the loss again, even at second-hand.
Clothes weren’t the only items that brought unbidden emotion. You can’t sort three decades of life with someone without tripping a few emotional landmines. Most were obvious and he prepared as best he could, did the deed, and endured. Some were booby-traps that he never saw coming. Once he pulled a fading photo from the pre-digital dark ages from where it had fallen behind a drawer. A deeply buried pain hit him like a physical blow and it was fortunate that he was already seated. The image had no direct connection to the memory but the six-degrees-separation synaptic connections were made in a heartbeat to the lost child they’d never even had time to name. When he could breathe again without pain, he threw the photo in the trash and called it a day. When he could not prepare or avoid, he called in reinforcements. That sympathetic sister and a couple of especially close friends proved themselves golden and ignored his shame for him.
After a “decent interval” (And just how the hell was that calculated?) other relatives, friends and acquaintances would come and go, some helpful, some less so. He was polite to all but encouraged none. He realized belatedly that he was sorting them too. Well. Alright then. So be it.
After the Great Sorting came the Lessor Labeling. This was much easier, for by now the sheer volume had been greatly reduced. Plus, he already had a pretty good notion of what he wanted to go to whom. Almost everything he wasn’t using on a daily basis went into this category. Smaller items were labeled, then packed into watertight plastic tubbies, with “manifest” lists taped to the sides in document protector sleeves. He came within a millisecond of putting a label on the label-maker but, as noted before, he wasn’t in the right frame of mind for humor. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he was stalling. But he changed neither his plans nor his pace. Lastly, there was the legal tedium of updating his will, lest his obsessive labeling all go to waste. He pitched the label-maker when its mission was completed.
The house was very clean. Empty rooms don’t require much maintenance. What furniture remained was covered in plastic sheeting. He was oddly reluctant to cover the bookshelves, just as he’d been reluctant to pack away the books themselves. He’d watched every movie, listened to every album, and read every book, save her college textbooks and her beloved crime mystery novels. No matter where they’d moved over the years, they’d both been loathe to part with any book, lugging the heavy boxes from post to post. Their library reflected them, in a way. It certainly reflected her. He’d always been amused but strangely proud that she’d placed a bookshelf in every room, to include cookbooks in the kitchen and long-since- cancelled-periodicals in the bathrooms. But eventually sense won out and the shelves too went under the shrouds because dust was a fact of life and he wanted to minimize any mess.
He shaved, performed other ablutions, then turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it. He got into the tub and for a very long time just sat and felt the stream on his head, listened to the soothing white noise and absently noted the dull weight of the .45 in his lap.
He still couldn’t stand the smell of gun oil. His last thought before everything went black was that now he’d never get the taste out of his mouth.