20 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
say that I had forgotten them, but the
bin hadn’t been opened since I’d
wrapped the pieces and stored them,
maybe fifteen years before. I spread out
the contents on the dining-room table.
These things were all Karl’s and, like
my glasses, predated our marriage.
He idly reunited a dish with its lid.
“Let’s get rid of it,” he said.
“Maybe you want to hold on to some
of it?”
“Ten years ago, I would have said
yes,” he said.
I waited for the second half of that
sentence to arrive, but nothing came.
Karl started to pile the silver back into
the bin without a hint of nostalgia. I
was worried that he would regret this
later and hold it against me. I said as
much, and he told me I was nuts. That
I was nuts was becoming increasingly
evident. Once full, the bin of silver was
as heavy as a pirate’s chest, and we strug-
gled to get it down to the basement to-
gether. He then called Leslie, the nurse
at his medical practice, who steers him
through his long, hard days with good
sense and good cheer, and invited her
to come over with her daughter to check
out what was available.
I was mercifully able to keep myself
from saying, “We were going to wait.”
Of course this would be Karl’s favor-
ite part, the part he would never be able
to wait for: he got to give these things
away. The first time I met Karl, he tried
to give me his car.
An hour later, we were in the base-
ment with Leslie and her daughter.
Leslie had come straight from work
and was wearing scrubs. Her daughter,
Kerrie, also a nurse, was wearing hik-
ing sandals and what appeared to be a
hiking dress. She had recently returned
from a journey down the Colorado
Trail—Denver to Durango—logging
five hundred miles alone. She came
down with COVID along the way and
waited it out in her tent.
“She just got engaged,” Leslie told
me. Kerrie smiled.
“You’re going to need things,” Karl
said.
Leslie laughed and told us that her
daughter could still fit everything she
owned in her car.
I believed it. Kerrie was the embod-
iment of fresh air and sunshine, her
only adornment a mass of spectacular
curls. Clearly, she had chosen to pur-
sue a completely different model of
adulthood. I watched as she took care-
ful steps around the glasses and the
cups laid out across the concrete floor.
She lifted a single oversized champagne
flute and held it up. “You really don’t
want these?” she asked.
I told her that I didn’t want any of
it. I didn’t tell her that she shouldn’t
want any of it, either.
She took the champagne flutes. She
took the brandy snifters, the decanter.
She took the set of demitasse cups, but
not the espresso cups. She took the
stack of glass plates and the large as-
sortment of mismatched wineglasses
that had multiplied like rabbits over
the years. Whenever she appeared to
have reached her limit, Karl picked up
something else and handed it to her.
She accepted a few silver serving pieces,
the square green serving dish. With
every acquisition she asked me again,
“Are you sure?”
I went through the motions of re-
assurance without being especially re-
assuring. The truth was, I felt oddly
sick—not because I was going to miss
these things but because somehow I
was tricking her. I was passing off my
burden to an unsuspecting sprite, and
in doing so was perpetuating the myths
of adult life that I had so wholeheart-
edly embraced. As she and her mother
tenderly wrapped all those champagne
flutes in dish towels, I pictured themtied to her backpack. When they were
finished, I helped them carry their
load out to the car. There they stood
in the light of the late afternoon,
thanking me and thanking me, say-
ing they couldn’t believe it, so many
beautiful things.
I had laid out my burden on the
basement floor and Kerrie had borne
it away. Or at least a chunk of it. There
was still so much of the house to sort.
“Don’t feel bad,” Karl said, as wewatched them back out of the drive-
way. “If we hadn’t given it to her, she
would have registered for it.”
I did feel bad, but not for very long.
The feeling that came to take its place
was lightness.
This was the practice: I was start-
ing to get rid of my possessions, at
least the useless ones, because pos-
sessions stood between me and death.
They didn’t protect me from death,
but they created a barrier in my un-
derstanding, like layers of bubble
wrap, so that instead of thinking about
what was coming and the beauty that
was here now I was thinking about
the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accu-
mulated. I had begun the journey of
digging out.
Later that evening, Karl called his
son and daughter-in-law, and they came
over to look through the basement
stash. After great deliberation, they
agreed to take a Pyrex measuring cup
and a device for planting bulbs. Karl’s
daughter came the next morning and
took the teacups, the industrial mixer,
and every bit of the remaining silver.
She was a woman who threw enor-
mous parties for no reason on random
Tuesdays. She was thrilled, and I was
thrilled for her. It had all changed that
fast. Making sure that the right per-
son got the right things was no longer
the point. The point was that those
things were gone.N
ight after night, I opened a closet
or a drawer or a cupboard and
began again. The laundry room was
surprisingly depressing, with that gal-
lon container of Tuff Stuff, a concen-
trated household cleaner I had bought
so many years ago from a Russian kid
who was selling it door to door. When
he saw that I was about to decline, he
unscrewed the cap and took a slug
straight from the bottle. “Nontoxic,”
he said, wiping his mouth with his
hand. “You try?” I found half a dozen
bottles of insect repellent with expira-
tion dates in the early two-thousands,
an inch of petrified Gorilla Glue, the
collar and the bowl of a beloved dog
long passed. The laundry room was
where things went to die.
Every table had a drawer, and every
drawer had a story—none of them in-
teresting. I scouted them out room by