Okay. Today was the day to throw away all the letters my mother saved. Mum saved every letter anyone ever sent to her. They were filled with silverfish. Flipping through them one last time that anyone would read them...tracing the family history. How many times the words, I love you and then signed...the Birthday cards and Valentines cards from my father to my mother, to my father from me, to my mother from my brother. I love you, I will always love you, You are the one in my life, love forever, over and over and over...in a million different ways, on hundreds of cards and in hundreds of letters.
Then under the huge pile in the bottom of the drawer a black ribbon. This is what is worn during a funeral.
I did find a poem Mum saved that I wrote in 2008:
I am more than stool and urine...
More than rotting flesh and teeth.
look beneath.
I am here.
I defy.
There's more to me than meets the eye.
Passed language, thought and words
Bound not by routine and ritual.
By sheer will.
I persevere.
I do not die.
Through love you see me, hear my silent cry.
Today was the letters and some day in the near future I'll have to deal with all the photos.
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A few weeks back my wife and I went through the same ritual. My father passed away sometime in March this year having led a full life. So many memories were involved, in the letters, cards and knick knacks, but as rightly said, they were full of silverfish and others.
And we too have a trunkload of photographs which have to sorted out and dealt from the fded beige of the 50's to the modern colour photos of the noughties and also the current decade.