A Kept Woman

I met my husband a little over a year after the death of his wife. She was thirty-seven when she died of breast cancer. She was his high school sweetheart and the love of his life. As with most new couples, in trying to find their niche in life, they had moved many times. He did a stint in the military before ending up working for the Army as a civilian. They were both avid collectors. Of what? Everything. She never learned to drive, but he took her everywhere, and one of her favorite places was flea markets.
When I met him, as I said, she had been been gone from his life for a year, and evidently he never quite got the hang of housekeeping. Or ever throwing anything away. I figured she had gone through this long illness and housekeeping, of course, was low on the list of priorities. I knew their hospice nurse, and she said the house was always very crowded with stuff and difficult to move around in when she was there taking care of his wife in her hospital bed.
So when we began dating, he would take me by his house occasionally, when he forgot something, but he'd always say, "If you want to just wait in the car, I'll run in and be right back." This went on for a year. I began to wonder why he never let me see the inside of his house.
Then one Christmas after we became engaged, his mother came to see him. While we were out to a restaurant with her, she coyly looked at me over her coffee cup and said, "Have you seen his house yet?"
"No."
"Well, maybe you should do that before you two make any decisions."
So he didn't make any dates with me for about a week, and declared the house clean enough to show to me. He invited me in. I stayed one minute and ran screaming in terror. Just kidding. It was junky, messy, piled high with stuff, and messy. Yes, I know I said messy twice, but it was double messy. And this was all after cleaning for a week.
So we had a talk. I said, "Look. I'm a freak. I hate my house to be cluttered. I'm a tosser. If you lay it down and I don't see you pick it up and use it for several months, it's likely to be gone. I clean my house every week and the first step in my cleaning process is to walk around the house with garbage bags. I throw away a lot of what you would call "good stuff." Like if my entertainment center looks too "filled," I will just cull down the books or whatever until it looks right to me. I drove my ex-husband crazy. His last words to me as he walked out the door were, "Well, now you have your little Tara and you can keep it arranged just like you want her and won't have to have my stuff in your way."
I thought, Yes, that's good. But even better, I won't have your sorry ass in the way.....
Ok, I regress.
I wanted him to know how I was. So his mom came back again that summer, and she asked again, "Have you seen his house yet?"
"Yes."
"And I've seen yours. Do you still think you could live with him?"
I said, "Yes, but he has to be willing to live a different way."
She then explained to me that she never raised him to live like that, but his late wife (his mom doesn't mind speaking ill of the dead) never cared if they lived in filth or not, so they did.

So, he had his house. I had my townhouse. Mine was paid for, his was not, so we moved here.
At first, he came with his clothes. He left everything else at the house. His daughter had moved in with her boyfriend several months before we married, so she would go by his house now and then and remove a few things. He just had his clothes here.

A year passes like this. Then another year. He is continuing to pay a house payment on that house and it sits there protecting his stuff from the elements. Now and then he mentioned that he needed to go over there and clean out the house and sell it. Into the third year, I asked him one day, "Are you holding onto the house in case this doesn't work out with us?"

I guess that got him moving. So he declared he was ready to do it. I told him, no problem, I'd help, we'd get this done in no time. So that weekend, I grab a couple of boxes of garbage bags, some boxes and boxing tape, and off we go. I've moved a lot. I always have a garbage bag and a box. Ten things in the bag, one in the box. (I travel light.) It took me about thirty seconds to realize that he was fishing things right back out of the garbage bag. Wrappers, empty candy boxes, things I would consider junk. So I sat back and watched him packing for awhile.

He was taking down each item, and carefully looking at it, through each pile of stuff piece by piece. Very slowly. Very methodically. And then it hit me. This is his life. These are his memories. Every piece of paper, every empty shopping bag, every empty shoe box. His life.

So I told him I wouldn't go back. We'd had the house payment for almost three years now. He'd just take his time and go through it and decide what he wanted to keep. I had attic space for some things. For months, he went by there a couple of times a week and worked at it. I'd go by now and then and see one bag out for the trash. It took him months and months. Finally, one day he told me, "I never thought it would be this hard making these decisions of what to keep and what to let go of."

So we made a deal. He could rent a large storage unit, and put everything in there that was left. Sell the house. A storage rental is much less than a house payment. He heaved a sigh of relief and did that. He said, "Once I get it into the storage unit, I'll go through the rest of it and get rid of it there." Sure.

When the house was emptied, I went in there like a tornado with my playtex rubber gloves, Pine-sol, rags, mop, broom and he went at hiring the carpet replaced, the house repainted inside and out (light beige of course). The house sold three days after it went on the market.

So then we had this storage building. I'm happy to report last weekend (we've been married almost five years now) he finished cleaning out the storage unit and turned in the key. Right now, I can barely fit my car into my garage but he assures me that is temporary, because he's going to take a lot of that to the thrift store to donate, some to the attic, some to his daughter, etc.

My heart aches for him when I think what he's gone through losing his wife and then having to sort through his life possessions like that. He's a glass half full kind of guy and I'm a "let's just throw out the glass, we don't use it anyway" kind of girl. But we have somehow blended.
His mom looks over the situation when she comes. My home is a little fuller, but neat and happy.
I'm glad I'm one of the things he decided to keep.