THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 17
his death, and we were sick with miss-
ing him. The dresser drawers had not
yet been opened; the overburdened
shelves in the highest reaches of the
closets were undisturbed. Still, Tavia
and Therese had already found more
than thirty power strips. Always a di-
rector, Kent saw every room as a stage.
Lighting was just one of his many
forms of genius.
Tavia wanted to show me a paint-
ing of a Hindu deity riding a white
bull, four blue arms reaching out in
every direction, that Kent had left me
in his will.
“I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” I
said, after careful study. I liked the paint-
ing, but either you have a place for that
sort of thing or you don’t.
Kent’s will was remarkably specific:
Tavia got the fourteen-inch All-Clad
covered sauté pan, Therese got the ex-
tensive collection of light bulbs, Tavia
got the blue wool blanket, Therese
got the midsize dehumidifier. The list
went on and on: art, artifacts, house-
hold supplies. Since neither Tavia nor
Therese had the space for more than
a few mementos, they decided to sell
most of their inheritance and split the
proceeds equally. I added the blue deity
to the sale.
“Take something else, then,” Tavia
said. “He’d want you to have some-
thing meaningful.”
In the end, I took a blue quartz egg
held upright by a silver napkin ring. I
took a case of Lance cheese crackers
with peanut butter and a gross of Gin
Gins ginger candy for the staff at the
bookstore I co-own. I claimed six boxes
of vegetable broth for myself.
For the rest of the summer, Tavia
drove down from Louisville on the
weekends to work with her sister on
the cleanout. I, too, kept going back
to 24-S, both to see my friend and to
watch the closing down of a world that
had helped shape me. “He made ev-
erything magic when he was alive,”
Therese said sadly one day. “Now it’s
all just stuff.” Friends and acquaintances
came before the estate sale, wanting
to pick through the bounty. I bought
the painting of a floating house that
had hung in Tavia’s bedroom through-
out our childhood, the first painting I
ever loved. I bought the green-and-
pink dining-room chairs and gave them
to my mother. Tavia was hugely re-
lieved to know that they would be in
a place where she could still come and
sit in them.
The deeper 24-S was excavated, the
more it yielded. Unit 24-S became the
site of an archeological dig, cordoned
off from the rest of the Georgetown
condominiums, where the two sisters
chipped into the past with little picks.
How had one man acquired so many
extension cords, so many batteries and
rosary beads?
Holding hands in the parking lot,
Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would
not do this to anyone. We would not
leave the contents of our lives for some-
one else to sort through, because who
would that mythical sorter be, anyway?
My stepchildren? Her niece? Neither
of us had children of our own. Could
we assume that our husbands would
make order out of what we left behind?
According to the actuarial tables, we
would outlive them.T
avia’s father died when she and I
were fifty-six years old. At any other
time, we might have been able to enjoy
a few more years of ignoring the fact
that we, too, were going to die, but
thanks to the pandemic such blithe dis-
regard was out of the question. I put
Kent’s egg and its silver napkin ring on
the windowsill in my office, where it
ceased to be blue and took on an inex-
plicable warm orange glow—Kent’s fa-
vorite color. Every day I looked at it and
thought about all the work to be done.
My friend Rick is a Realtor who
lives in my neighborhood. We run into
each other most mornings when we’re
out walking our dogs. He’d been after
me for a while to look at a house that
was for sale down the street. “Just look,”
he said. “You’re going to love it.” I didn’t
want a different house, but, months
after Kent’s death, his legacy still
nagged. Maybe by moving I could force
myself to contend with all the boxed-up
stuff in my own closets.
Walking down the street to see a
house that we passed every day, my
husband, Karl, and I convinced our-
selves that this was exactly the change
we needed, so we were almost disap-
pointed to find that we didn’t like this
other house nearly as much as we liked
the one we already lived in.“I wonder if we could just pretend
to move,” I said to Karl that night over
dinner. “Would that be possible? Go
through everything we own and then
stay where we are?”
I could have said, “I wonder if we
could just pretend to die,” but that
pulled up a different set of images en-
tirely. Could we at least prepare? Wasn’t
that what Kent had failed to do? To
make imagining his own death part
of his spiritual practice, to look around
24-S and try to envision the world with-
out him?
Karl had been living in our house
for twenty-five years. I’d been there for
sixteen—the longest I’d ever lived any-
where, by more than a decade. Ours
was a marriage of like-minded neat-
ness. Karl’s suit jacket went directly
onto a hanger. I wiped down the kitchen
counters before going to bed. Our
never-ending stream of house guests
frequently commented on the tranquil-
lity of our surroundings, and I told
them that the secret was not having
much stuff.
But we had plenty of stuff. It’s a big
house, and over time the closets and
drawers had filled with things we never
touched and, in many cases, had com-
pletely forgotten we owned. Karl said
that he was game for a deep excava-
tion. He was working from home. I had
stopped travelling. If we were ever going
to do this, now was the time.
I started in the kitchen, a room that’s
friendly and overly familiar, sitting on
the floor, in order to address the lower
cabinets first. The plastic soup con-
tainers were easy—I’d held on to too
many of those. At some point, I’d
bought new bread pans without let-
ting the old ones go. I had four colan-
ders. Cabinet by cabinet, I pulled out
the contents, assessed, divided, wiped
down, replaced. I filled the laundry
basket with the things I didn’t want or
need and carried those discards to the
basement. I made the decision to wait
until we’d finished with the entire house
before trying to find a place for the
things we were getting rid of. This was
a lesson I’d picked up from my work:
writing must be separate from editing,
and if you try to do both at the same
time nothing will get done. I would
not stop the work at hand in order to
imagine who might want the square