The Administration of Debris

Sorting through what remains

Category: Bereavement

This booklet is for months one through three. The period when everyone expects you to start ‘dealing with’ their things. Their belongings. Their stuff. The physical evidence of their existence. The house is still full of them. Their clothes. Their books. Their collections. Everything they owned. Everything they touched.

Opening the Closet

You open the door. The smell hits you first. Them. Their scent. Still there. Fading but present. The smell is them. Is all that’s left of their physical presence. You breathe it in. Start crying immediately. Haven’t even touched anything yet. Just the smell is enough.

The Technology Problem

Their phone. Their computer. Their devices. All locked. Or not locked. Either way, impossible. The devices hold their digital life. Their photos. Their files. Their messages. Their searches. Their passwords. Their everything. You have to go through them. You can’t go through them.

The Things You Keep Forever

Some things you’ll never give away. Never throw away. Never let go of. Their wedding ring. Their watch. Their favorite jacket. Their handwriting. Their voice recordings. Their photos. These things are sacred. Untouchable. Permanent keepers.

Good Company

Blue Nights — Joan Didion, 2011
Didion’s memoir about her daughter’s death becomes an inventory of objects, baby shoes, photographs, medical records, christening dresses kept in storage. She interrogates why we keep things, what objects hold, and whether preserving belongings preserves the person. She writes about the paralysis of deciding what stays and what goes, the guilt of discarding, the impossibility of keeping everything. It’s about the specific torture of being custodian of someone’s physical evidence.
Personal Shopper — Olivier Assayas, 2016
Maureen works in Paris while waiting for a sign from her recently dead twin brother. She moves through spaces full of other people’s belongings, touching fabrics, sorting clothes, managing objects professionally while unable to manage her brother’s possessions personally. Assayas captures the haunted quality of handling things that belong to the absent, the way objects vibrate with presence, and how the material world becomes unbearable when the person who animated it is gone.
Carrie & Lowell — Sufjan Stevens, 2015
Stevens sorts through the debris of his mother’s life after her death, memories, places, objects, unresolved questions. These quiet songs are an inventory of what remains: a swimming pool, a video store, a recipe, a name. He holds each fragment up, examines it, grieves it, sets it down. The album is the emotional equivalent of opening the closet, touching each thing, crying, deciding what to keep, knowing nothing you keep will be enough.