When Things are Heavy
Untitled, Oak and marble, by Todd Michael Tawd.
In 1997, my best friend and I wanted to move away from Denver. We chose a few cities we had never been to before, rolled some dice, and landed on Portland. We haphazardly packed our U-Haul, medicated our cats for the long drive, and drove away with about $500 between us. We have been here ever since.
After nearly 30 years, it’s time to leave one of my favorite places on Earth for another adventure.
This time, I am not 21 years old and free of responsibility. I am 50. I am bringing my children. (And our cats…always with the cats! lol). I can’t just grab a U-Haul and go because there’s literally an ocean between here and Berlin. Bringing physical items is expensive and cumbersome.
As I sort through my house I think of Marie Kondo, except the question for me is not, “Does this bring me joy?” Instead it is, “Do I care about this enough to bring it across an ocean?” Emotional weight is considered. Sometimes there is a clear yes or no. Other times guilt crawls in, or nostalgia overwhelms me. The magic 8 ball has spoken: Maybe. These items I have to put back on the shelf to revisit another time.
And then there are the things that Todd built. My late husband was 6’ 4” and could build anything—and he always built it big. When I first met him, he was building a canoe out of strips of wood. He had gone to Powell’s book store, grabbed a book about building canoes, sat in the coffee shop there and spent the afternoon reading it. He didn’t even buy the book—he just read it and then went home and spent the next several months building the most beautiful canoe you’ve ever seen. Eighteen feet long, three and half feet wide, from strips of wood with slices of geodes inlaid into the bow and the stern.
Later he collected old tables made of oak, and used marble and granite to inlay mosaics into them. Our dining room table was one of these; stunningly gorgeous but weighing hundreds of pounds.
He built my art studio, too, when I was pregnant with our daughter and needed to move my art practice out of the room that would become her bedroom. He could build anything, and he often did. All of these things were supplemented by the things he collected—hundreds of tools, tens of musical instruments and equipment, giant racks of recording equipment, the innards of a piano, cabinets of cords…
I was left with the weight of these things. Filled with his essence, they are his art and his soul, fully charged with all of my complicated feelings for him. Love, of course, admiration for his skill and artistry, anger at him for leaving me to deal with everything he left behind, and a stew of messy feelings for the way he left and the way he lived before he left (perhaps a story for another time).
These things are heavy in every sense of the word. As each one finds a home I find myself overwhelmed by grief as I am forced to let go again and again and again. A friend picked up the canoe and we were talking and joking about how everything Todd did was so big. Suddenly I broke down mid-sentence. Movers came to take the table (to another friend, thankfully), and as soon as they left the house I fell to the floor, sobbing in a way I had not done since the first year after he died.
Then slowly, steadily, the space feels lighter. Empty but not vacant; it feels tidy, open. It feels filled with opportunity and ready to breathe. The space itself seems to become bigger. I remember a little bit how many possibilities it held when we first bought the house. Slowly, steadily, as I let go again and again and again, I begin to feel ready.
Ready to let go.
Ready to begin a new adventure and leave the heavy things behind.