Not long before the Covid pandemic, my dad threw out my cardboard box of mementoes that I had stored in his garage for “safekeeping”: years’ worth of personal journals, Polaroids and photos with no negatives, love letters, all of my degree essays, reams of teenage poetry, etc – the classic priceless time capsule stuff that one looks forward to revisiting one day.
It was one of his final acts before taking his own life, so it was a double whammy of bereavement in which my first loss was buried by the second. And, with the pandemic arriving shortly afterwards, it stayed buried for further years as, again, I was distracted by something else serious happening. But once that had passed, the original grief returned with a vengeance and has become an abiding sorrow that’s been difficult to shake off: the feeling that part of me died when that box went into landfill and can never be recovered, and how its significance seems to grow with time, not diminish.
