September 17, 2024

Reflections of a childless cat man | LISB

Micro-adventures, kittens, and embedded memories

Hey y’all!

My wife’s grandfather died last week. He was 97, and while death is seldom convenient or hoped for, he had a really good life and was mentally sharp and physically active until the very last few weeks of his life. As the nurse in the hospital said, his longevity represented the sort you aspire to. 

While the dead are unconcerned with us, death always brings introspection for those left behind. Death represents the end of chances to make things different, the loss of future progress, the inability to fix things that went wrong. It’s a full stop, instead of a comma. 

In our minds, there will always be more time to fix the mistakes we made, to clean up the messes, to put things in order. There is never enough time. Death always interrupts plans, death always leaves a mess behind.

He outlived all his siblings and his children and some of his grandchildren - my wife and her siblings and their kids are his only remaining relatives. And of all of us, we have the most flexible schedule, so one day soon we will go to Oklahoma to his small apartment and sort things out into piles: This one for the charity shops, that one for the family, and this larger pile to go on the curb or in the dumpster.  Luckily for us, he was not a hoarder or overly sentimental toward things. 

But it does make me, a childless cat man in my fifties, married to a wife with medical issues who I will likely outlive, wonder for not the first time who is going to clean up the mess when I (hopefully many, many years in the future) die. 

Who will clean out the house, sort the thousands of books, put the house up for sale, make the trips to the dump, organize the estate sale? It is unlikely that any one person will want this weird library of cookbooks, psychology, woodworking, sociology, horticulture, and theology books that are all over my house. The metal box of pocket knives that all have meaning to me, handed down by old men now dead, will be so much yard sale material, assuming someone can be bothered to hold the yard sale. 

I have friends who are extremely concerned about this question, and so they are purging all of their possessions down to the essential few - not because they want to lighten their lives but as a means of preparing while living for their inevitable death. I resist this, because while it is true that I will one day be dead, today I am not. I want to only taste death once. 

So, I do not know. It weighs on me, this question of a childless old age and death. I strive to surround myself with things that inspire, that are beautiful, that are signifiers of hope. And one day, they will just be part of the mess I leave behind. 

Five Beautiful Things

Roy Clark was best known to my generation as the co-host of Hee-Haw, the musical variety show, but he was once the top-earning country star in the world and was highly respected. He was a master of the guitar, as this live performance of Malagueña shows. 

Folks in the transplant community have talked about this for decades, but apparently some heart transplant recipients also get memories and cravings from their donors, which leads researchers to propose that memories are stored in the heart’s cells as well as in the brain. 

TIL about knolling, which is the term for when items are laid out at 90 degree angles or parallel to each other as a method of organization. If you have spent any time at all on Instagram, you have seen this - often when folks are showing the contents of their bags, for example. Anyway, there is a subReddit devoted to the subject and filled with example pictures, and I love this aesthetic. Were I a billionaire, I would pay people to come behind me and knoll the piles I leave behind. 

My wife and I seldom take “real” multiple-week once-a-year vacations, preferring instead to take what we think of as mini-vacations, 2-3 days long, spread throughout the year. So I love this idea of microadventures, to break up your routine and open your eyes to new perspectives.

Like many of you, I was touched when Gus Walz, overcome with emotion at seeing his father on stage at the DNC National Convention, shouted out, “That’s my Dad!” The joy, the love, and the honesty in a world where all too often we are taught to repress our emotions in the name of decorum was refreshing. Poet D.A. Gray captured this beautifully in their poem That’s My Dad.

In case you missed it

The most opened link in the last issue was the list of 100 tiny hacks to make your life better.

On the blog, I continued my series of stories from working among the unhoused population by telling you about the time I almost told off a well-meaning church lady who wanted to know why bad things happen.

I announced last month that people who support my work via our membership team in any amount now receive bonus essays every Saturday morning, in addition to other perks like occasional office hour calls, an archive of some of my unpublished work, the knowledge that they helped make my writing possible, and my sincere gratitude. Members now have an archive of 5 original essays not published anywhere else, and it’s growing weekly.

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Y’all take care of yourselves, OK?

HH

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Hugh L. Hollowell Jr​
​he/him​
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