When We're Too Old to Hang Onto Those Memories, and the Judgment That Comes With Them

Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society

Photo by Joshua Rondeau on Unsplash

The clothing we wear, what we discard, and the stories they tell

Sue Fagalde Lick , who lives a few hours north or where I woke up this morning in Coos Bay, is going through much the same process I am right now as we process stuff, justify or un-justify whether or not to keep a thing.

This is the thought from Sue’s piece that got my attention this morning:

It’s like the red jacket I thought I would wear to church on Saturday with a white blouse and black slacks. When I looked in the closet, it was gone. I had forgotten I gave it to Goodwill a few months ago because it was out of style and didn’t fit well anymore.

But I used to look really good in that jacket. I guess I want to hold on to the woman I was when I bought it as a newly fledged newspaper editor. (Author bolded)

This line struck me in particular because I’ve been so identified with a part of me that looked a very certain way at a very certain time in my life. My clothing closet is one of the last areas where I get to do the deep dive. I have a few things that I know damned good and well I need to release.

One of them is a simply lovely, diaphanous Italian wedding dress (oh for crying out LOUD) that I bought some twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago. I had something like three or four of them, which, if you aren’t holding your sides right now, I sure am, I had collected at a Certain Time.

There’s a story behind that. Always is. I was on business travel in Alabama. I’m a Southern girl by birth, and by culture to a degree. Weddings are Very Big Business in the Deep South. When you catch a man, you’re job’s done, honey. So while shopping at the local TJ Maxx, which like the gym was a second home for me, I stumbled on a huge collection of wedding dresses.

Buyers know their markets, and for that part of the South, it was wedding season. I bought three.

No really. Three wedding dresses.

I’m not one to do things halfway.

I must have thought that if I had enough wedding gowns around, some poor sot was going to ask.

My friend Lynn, who had read and completely believed The Secret (just visualize it, you get it, right, SURE) bought and hung a wedding dress on the back of her front door.

It didn’t work.

Despite the fact that for years my closet sported multiple wedding dresses (I found another on ebay), which allowed for a costume change throughout a ceremony which never took place, this born- and bred- Southern girl did not succeed in Getting The Man.

I sold the others. Somehow this piece of long, white, nearly-transparent silk has managed to get packed along with me as I have aged into my seventies without having collected a semi-permanent spouse along the way.

Shit, I collected damn near everything else. You’d think I’d have had one of those more than a couple of years. Okay, look, at least I did that, that one had an anger and alcohol issue, so I’m thinking it doesn’t count. It counts as a mistake on both our parts, but it wasn’t a marriage marriage, the kind where there are years and years of memories.

Besides. He didn’t ask me to marry him. Not in that Mr. Bingley on-the-knee way. We fell into it by default, with zero ceremony. And fell out of it, too, with equally zero ceremony. Without many memories, the deep kind that sustain.

The kinds of memories Sue is dealing with as she, too, processes through what to keep and what to trash, what to treasure and what to release.

Every one of us who reaches a Certain Age deals with these decisions. Just as Sue faces the question of what honors her husband’s memory, I have to question what items simply unearth deeply unpleasant memories as well as reveal my attachment to aspects of my life which really need to float down the river. Away.

That lovely wedding dress is now hanging in open view in my closet. The ugly part of my heart argues that it’s proof I’m not worthy of love. The loving part of my heart mourns that loss, but also reminds me that boy, have I had a life because I didn’t marry, didn’t have children.

Those two parts of me fight like banshees sometimes.

The better part of me wins more often than not. The blaming part has deep roots in societal constructs that I decided to leave behind. The echoes still rise, though, especially when the process of release begs deep assessment of life.

Sue is exploring getting rid of her husband’s things, I’m getting rid of several lifetime’s worth of stuff, much of it unused, so that another life is possible. We are both considering the importance of letting go of a house that’s too big and too demanding.

There is no avoiding these choices if we are going to move well into our final years.

Sue ends her piece with a series of excellent questions. I’m going to end mine with a love letter to the dress.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

Thank you for the hope. But thank you more for staying inside that perfect plastic bag so that I could do what I always wanted to do, years and years of adventure travel.

The dress, the dream, that was not my life. But the life I did have, my god. What a life that has been. And continues to be.

As I get ready to pack my bags and head south to see the great sequoias this week, I am reminded that every decision we make is a fork in the road. Some of them are monumental decisions.

Be married or not. Have kids or not. This job, or that job.

They all lead to new lands, new experiences, as we pass on what was available to us had we traveled the other road.

I love my road. I am tossing more stuff away so that I can choose yet another road, until all roads end.

Let’s play.

Photo by Jay Gomez on Unsplash

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