What I was meant to keep

After a year, my father told me he was taking everything to Goodwill. “It’s been a year,” he said.

“But I’m not ready.”

“I’m going Friday,” he said.

“I’ll get whatever I want by the end of the week,” I told him. And I let Friday come and I let Friday go, barely breathing on the frosty morning my father boxed it all up. I should have helped him, carried and folded and cleaned with him. But I couldn’t. Because I’d already done it once, a first going-through with my mother before she was gone.

“Come help me clean out the clothes that don’t fit me anymore,” she’d asked.

It was casual and unassuming, but we gathered in her bedroom to go through nearly every piece of my mother’s winter clothes—in November. We moved onto her tees and shorts, too. Nobody said anything as we completed the task, a quiet acknowledgement that my mother would not likely see another year.

“How about this shirt?” I held up a navy blue-striped shirt, her signature look. “And this one and this one?” Two more polos, red and yellow stripes, the same shirt. We laughed. My mother’s trademark purchase was to buy three of any one shirt she liked.

“Keep the navy one,” she said. I sat on the bed and held it in my hands, smoothed the collar and folded it in thirds, the way she had taught me. When my mother turned away, I breathed it in.

“You should try it on,” I said - why, I don’t know. “Does it still fit?”

My mother no longer tried to hide the scar on her breast. It was an ugly and persistent mark, going in one side of her bra and out the other, up under her arm. I pulled the shirt over her thin hair, but it hung on her, a full two sizes too big. My mother, who had dieted her whole life, had lost 20 pounds to chemo.

She pulled it off slowly. I didn’t help; she was sick of being helped. She tossed the shirt across the bed.

“Pitch it,” she said with a light laugh.

“You’ve got to keep something,” I said. I couldn’t stand to clean out an entire closet, haul away my mother’s wardrobe while she still sat there, living and breathing. I wanted to hear my mother say this wasn’t happening. I wanted another summer with her under the crabapple tree and silver maple, where the branches had met above and grown together, cupping mother and daughter for 30 seasons.

“I don’t need much, honey,” my mother replied. She pulled the too-big blue shirt from the pile, leaning out of her wheelchair to reach it. “But I’ll keep this one. It’ll work.” A small concession to her youngest daughter.

My mother, 1988.

In the end, she saved us an unfathomable chore after she was gone, but cleaning out her clothes with her meant we’d kept nothing. There was no reason to be sentimental. We were fine; she was still here. God, she was right here. So we gave away nearly everything. She never once said, keep this or take that. Her old sweatshirts and the head scarves for chemo that my Aunt Barb had made her, all gone.

But what would I have kept? Because when my father took away the very last of her clothing - including the navy blue shirt - that Friday, I couldn’t go and didn’t go, to get it. Her small concession to her youngest daughter, sent to Goodwill in the end anyway. I didn’t want the shirt; I wanted my mother.

After it was all gone (and I checked—I opened every closet the minute my father wasn’t home and ransacked the house to see that it had been done), I lived in fear every day I was in town. Would a woman walk by in my mother’s shirt? Would I recognize her shoes or her purse?

Once, the month after my mother died, I thought I saw my mother crossing the mall parking lot, wearing the navy blue striped shirt.

But, the first time I did find my mother’s clothing on another woman was a year later. By then, my father had met someone. I stopped by one evening unannounced, as I did when my mother had been alive, but I had to knock at the door now.

So I did, hard, my knuckles white with impact. A way to note my displeasure, to begin knocking after growing up here, and another 10-plus years of coming in the door without hesitation with grandkids in tow. A sound “eff you”—rap-rap—on the door of the house that I considered my home.

And his new companion opened the door and stood in front of me - wearing my mother’s jacket.

Navy blue, a Jackson Hole logo over the chest. I had a forest green one; we’d bought them together. And so it was. My father had saved a few things apparently and, like a ghost, it hung off this strange woman.

As the moment passed, and my heart finally stilled, I saw that I did not need my mother’s clothing, after all. The jacket was no longer hers. It was just a nylon scrap with cuffs and zippers. Practical in a rainstorm. Nothing more.

No, I hadn’t kept the clothing, but I had kept better things instead. Things that didn’t go in boxes, that didn’t get hauled away. Things I couldn’t hold and couldn’t touch. Things that I could never lose.

Because I got to keep my mother: who she was, what we had, how it was. And I didn’t need her navy blue-striped shirt or anything else to remember those days when I never knocked on the door. Or those mornings under the apple tree out back. Or the afternoons I’d play hooky from school and we’d run to the mall instead, to buy three colors of some new shirt.

Those were mine to keep.

Forever.

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