Sharon Smith: I saved THAT?

By Sharon Smith
Special to the Tri-City Times

Going through my desk drawer, I came across a swatch of fabric I had cut from my dad’s desk chair about 10 years ago. 

My dad died in 2009, but I kept his desk chair for at least five years after. Why was I so sentimental about such an uncomfortable, outdated, heavy rolling desk chair? I asked myself why I had saved it, and I figured it was because I had so many memories of my dad sitting in that chair and working.

He wrote and published countless articles after his retirement, and every time I visited, he was working in that uncomfortable, scratchy, lumpy, beige desk chair. When I finally was able to let the chair go, I couldn’t completely let it go. I had to cut some fabric off just to remind myself of my dad. But time and dust shouted that it was time for this swatch to go also. So into the trash it went.

Going through my T-shirt drawer I found my “Hope College Swimming and Diving” shirt I had saved since I swam competitively in college. We’re talking about a few decades ago. That, too, went into the trash. It felt good, actually, not to hang onto these any longer.

What was the change? I guess I realized the fabric square wasn’t my dad. The T-shirt wasn’t my college years. At some point, the object had finished doing its job as a keeper of memory.

I believe I have sometimes confused remembering with keeping. I have saved things like ticket stubs, handwritten notes, ripped photographs, because I was thinking I was preserving the memory. Sometimes I was.     

But maybe memories are a little less fragile than we think. My dad has been gone for seventeen years, and I don’t need a piece of his desk chair to remember him sitting there. I don’t need a college T-shirt to remember what it felt like to be young and competitive and capable of experiencing a “runner’s high” while working out hard. Throwing those things away didn’t make me feel like losing those parts of my life.  

Maybe our perspective changes with time. We discover that we don’t have to preserve every version of ourselves. Some things can be remembered without being retained. Some things can be loved without being kept. And perhaps there is a freedom in realizing that letting go of an object isn’t necessarily letting go of what it represents.

I’m not suddenly a minimalist. I know that I still have some sentimental objects, for example my mom’s fairy tale book from her childhood. What should I do with that? It will likely survive me. But for me at least, it’s worth asking when I come across a box of stuff that means nothing to anyone but me: Do I need to keep this or do I already have the memory?

— The Rev. Sharon Smith is a pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, writer, professor, and reluctant collector of things she is eventually going to throw away.