Vox Meditantis

What have you been putting off doing? Why?

Sunday, 12th October 2025

The question sits on the edge of my desk, scrawled on a slip of paper that arrived this morning amongst the usual correspondence – a prompt from that daily writing exercise I’d rather fancied trying. What have you been putting off doing? Why? Simple enough on its surface, yet like so many simple questions, it carries a weight that settles uncomfortably between the ribs.

I’ve been putting off clearing out Mother’s things.

She’s been gone eighteen years now – passed in 2007, the same vibrant spirit that once charmed casino patrons and neighbours alike finally quieted by age and illness – yet her belongings remain largely untouched in the guest room upstairs. Father managed to sort through some of it after she died, keeping what mattered most to him, but when he followed her two years later, the task fell to me, the youngest, the one who’d stayed in New Corinth whilst Michael settled in Baltimore and Susan made her life in Pennsylvania.

I tell myself it’s a matter of time, that my practice demands too much attention, that there are more pressing concerns. These excuses wear the comfortable costume of reasonableness, yet I know better. In my profession, I’ve sat across from countless individuals who’ve erected similar barriers between themselves and the work of grief, and I recognise the architecture of avoidance when I construct it myself.

The truth, when I permit myself to examine it with the same scrutiny I’d bring to a patient’s resistance, is rather more complicated. Mother’s things – her costume jewellery still bright in its lacquered boxes, her collection of Nevada postcards, the silk scarves she favoured, her handwritten recipes for dishes she’d learnt in casino break rooms – all of it represents something I’m reluctant to lose. Whilst she lived, these objects were simply hers, unremarkable in their dailiness. Now they’ve become relics, and sorting through them feels dangerously close to a final sorting of her, a cataloguing that makes her absence absolute.

There’s something else, too, something I’ve only recently begun to acknowledge. Mother embodied a particular kind of boldness I’ve never quite managed to claim for myself. Her adventurousness, that willingness to leap first and consider the consequences later, lives now only in anecdotes and the physical remnants of a life lived with considerable verve. I inherited her curiosity, certainly, and her warmth with people, but not her audacity. I chose steadiness instead, perhaps too much of Father’s quiet containment and not enough of her daring.

Confronting her belongings means confronting that divergence, the ways I am not her, the chances I didn’t take because I valued security and professional reputation and the careful construction of a life that serves others. I wonder sometimes if she’d be disappointed, though that’s likely an unfair projection. She never suggested I ought to be anything other than what I am. Still, in the accumulated detritus of her days – ticket stubs from shows she attended on whims, maps marked with routes she drove just to see where they led – I see evidence of an appetite for experience I’ve never quite allowed myself.

So the guest room remains as it is, a shrine of sorts, though I dislike that word. It’s not veneration that keeps me from the task but something closer to fear – not of memory itself, but of what completing this final act of stewardship might reveal about the life I’ve chosen, the adventures I haven’t pursued, the ways I’ve let caution shape my days.

I shall do it eventually, of course. I’m fifty-eight now, hardly young, and there’s a particular absurdity in postponing indefinitely a task that will only grow more difficult with time. Perhaps next spring, when the harbour light is good and the windows can be opened to air out the staleness of preservation. I’ll sort carefully, as is my nature, deciding what Michael and Susan might want, what ought to go to charity, what I can bear to keep.

But not quite yet. For now, I’m content – if that’s the right word – to let Mother’s things remain where they are, a gentle haunting, a reminder that some postponements are less about cowardice than about honouring complexity, about giving oneself permission to approach difficult thresholds at one’s own pace rather than rushing to closure before one is truly ready.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved. | 🌐 Translate