Easter Shoes

Easter Sunday will make four months he's been gone. I spent a lot of time today in his room. He had taken the bedstead down and put the mattress and box springs on the floor. I put all that back together and washed the bed linens. Now the room looks like Mama wanted it to look all along!

I also spent considerable time trying to organize his clothing and prepare it to wash. He always loved clothes and he had a lot. We used to tease him about having more clothes than a girl. He brought a lot of it to Pennsylvania with him. So when his friend brought those clothes back they were in big Rubbermaid totes and it was hard to tell what was clean and what was dirty. So I want to wash it all. We'd also been digging in it from time to time. It's hard to explain but we'd often end up in there just looking through his stuff as if we could find him hidden away in one of the piles of clothing. The girls had certain shirts of his they wanted to keep and they looked for those. So everything was sort of strung about.

I found an old Whataburger shirt he had when he worked for Whataburger. For three nights. And on the third night, when we thought he was working, he skipped out and got into some trouble. I commandeered that shirt as a sleeping shirt. Later, he did learn to be more responsible and consistent about his work.

There was one shirt that still smells so much like him that I separated it out from the laundry loads. I want to hang onto it a little longer and just wrap my face in it from time to time.

We (his sisters and I) teased him about these shoes when he bought them. They look like his toes would not be able to go all the way to the end. It looks like to me you could cut two inches off the shoe and it would still fit. The shoes had been sitting on his dresser all this time and they never failed to make me smile when I came in his room and saw them.

It's funny, the things you think of. We thought about burying him in these shoes, but there were two problems: I couldn't bear to let the shoes go, and his suit was black and the shoes are brown. He would not have approved of that arrangement!

I've got a pair of his Justin Ropers in his closet that he wore when he was three or four, and a pair of huge work boots he bought when he was working in Texas. I'm going to figure out a way to photograph the two of those together.

All these things have their way of healing my heart. I am at peace about his death. But that does not keep me from missing him very, very much.