My father threw away my childhood possessions – then took his own life

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5 days ago

Sometimes it's not something you've seen tangibly in front of you that stays with you for the rest of your days, be that a disturbing horror movie or real-life car crash. It's suddenly seeing nothing where something important should be.
And nothing is exactly how I saw it when I stepped into my father's garage one day seven years ago, to find it starkly bare, voided of the classic dad-junk that had cluttered the space for years. Gone were the half-used paint cans and rusty garden tools, the grandchildren's obsolete toys and pieces of old furniture waiting to be fixed or upcycled.
I should have felt admiration and approval, for his 'getting things done' and having a clear-out after a year of listlessness since Mum had died. Instead I felt a heart-sinking horror at the prospect the worst had happened.
Buried beneath all that worthless flotsam had lived something of incalculable importance to me, which I'd entombed there for 'safekeeping' as I moved from house to house.
It was a large cardboard box, emblazoned with the words 'DON'T THROW AWAY' in black marker pen on each side. It contained the entirety of my life mementoes: a distillation chiefly of my childhood, teenage and university years.
Inside was the priceless time-capsule items one looks forward to revisiting one day: years' worth of personal journals; Polaroids and photos with no negatives; love letters; reams of teenage poetry; all my degree essays and education certificates; all the local newspaper and student-mag articles of my early journalism years.
Essentially it held the most important artefacts, documents and keepsakes from the first 30 years of my life – I was 39 at the time.
I knew there and then that it was all gone, and irretrievable: the 'clear-out' had taken place months prior, spontaneously, with Dad quick to exonerate himself by blaming the 'builder' he had hired to clear his garage and dispose of the contents, not realising or 'forgetting' my life-box was among it all.
If there was one thing I knew about my father, it's that he was a terrible liar. He expected me to believe this workman had not checked with him despite the large letters daubed on the side of the box.
He knew full well that box was there, why it was there and what it meant, and for reasons I'll never understand, he'd callously binned it himself with his own hands.
This was established instantly: a swift phone call to the builder confirmed what I already knew: he hadn't cleared any garage or outbuildings as it wasn't part of his service remit, for anyone.
But it didn't matter that Dad was 'busted'. He simply flapped about it being an easy mistake to make – and please don't go on about it as he had enough already on his plate and it was only old junk.
It was in that bleak moment that the irony sledge-hammered me: I, someone who placed so much importance on physical memories, had left mine in the protection of someone who absolutely didn't.
The bitterest pill for me, however, was that he had not even set it aside just in case, or made a quick call to check if I still wanted it. He didn't even need the space in his now-empty garage or the three-bed house he was rattling around in.
It was the utter needlessness of the act that I couldn't fathom. But I simply had no choice but to chalk it up to 'experience'. I couldn't 'go on about it' as implored because Dad was a broken man, and had been since Mum's passing. He didn't know what to do with his life except wanting to end it, which he had not just threatened but attempted, hospitalising himself with a botched effort. I had to bury my acrimony.
And the worst then happened only weeks later. He was gone for good after succeeding this time in taking his own life, and so the previous calamity was simply supplanted and snuffed out by the next.
Both the throwing away of the box and then the throwing away of himself had been destructive acts over which I'd had no control, so I would just have to learn to accept and live with it.
Covid arrived not long after, and a pandemic and lockdowns and everything else in those crazy couple of years kept me distracted and diverted from all that had happened before.
And once the country was back to normality again, and I'd landed a long-term copywriting contract, I truly felt like I'd emerged from all the earlier heartache like a butterfly from a chrysalis. How wrong I would be.
Five years on, in 2023, out of nowhere the grief returned with a vengeance, but this time transmuted into something closer to consuming anger and rancour – emotions I'd kept in check at the time because of the situation with Dad. They had lain dormant all those years until finally finding an opening to vent, the trigger being my deciding to clear out my own junk-filled spare room, and deciding what needed to be chucked. Suddenly the dam burst and it all flooded back.
The Kübler-Ross grief stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – had basically been upended: I'd had to leapfrog straight to 'acceptance'.
Turns out your mind doesn't let you off that lightly: there are no shortcuts. Those early stages are simply deferred, held 'in the bank', and I'd now experience the disbelief and ire years after the fact, long after thinking I was in the clear.
Triggers arose everywhere: anything to do with history, personal possessions, memories, from someone mentioning something in conversation to a scene in a movie, would lead back to the feeling that part of me had died when that box went into landfill.
Why on earth had I not liberated it when I had the chance, I'd continually curse myself, as if I'd had any way of knowing what was going to happen. Another grievance was that without any of my old ticket stubs or diary entries, I could no longer pinpoint the dates or times of anything I'd seen or visited – my curated life chronology now just a vague swirl of guesswork.
Maybe that's a good thing, someone suggested to me: 'Without objects to steer your memory, you're free to remember anything in any order.'
And that's what I've learnt to do now: to see things differently, or at least try to, or I'd just afflict my remaining life with futile recriminations over a deceased father who I can never otherwise properly mourn.
Finding new meaning after loss is a powerful thing, someone else said to me. That helped clarify the importance of talking about it, whether to friends or a therapist, and not 'being a man' and just suppressing it all, as if that would help.
Researching similar stories showed me I'm far from alone, from the theft of a removals truck containing an entire home's contents to storage-unit conflagrations, or the hapless man who couldn't afford to keep up with his storage arrears while seconded abroad and returned to find the company had subsequently destroyed his life possessions (was in the Ts-and-Cs, apparently).
Writing about it helps, even if just as a warning to anyone likewise storing precious personal items with parents/relatives for 'safekeeping'. While the lesson is too late for me to learn, it should at least underscore the importance of keeping those things within your own control, their destiny in your own hands.
Other recently emerging silver linings include my mind now compensating in other ways. Music has always been a potent transporter, but certain songs from my youth suddenly hold more evocative power than ever.
I've also become given to organising large-scale social events, like an annual indoor mini-festival in a rural stately home for friends, or a high-school reunion attended by 120 people in my hometown – it's all about making the most of time left now, forging new life experiences I probably wouldn't otherwise have bothered with.
On a practical note, as that box was the only thing I'd have rescued from a house fire, I no longer bother with contents insurance. Once the irreplaceable stuff is gone, everything else just becomes the opposite.
Nowadays I can see more of the funny side, if you could call it that, of any of the triggers that not long ago plagued me. A recent Telegraph article on 'Döstädning' (decluttering) raised a smile at the irony of Dad's own little declutter session where he certainly was as 'ruthless' as the practice recommends.
Earlier this year, during my latest fast-tracked bucket-list experience – a Beatles location pilgrimage in Liverpool, after a lifetime of Fab Four fandom – I was struck by a Paul McCartney quote reflecting on his unsteady relationship with John Lennon not long before his murder: 'His bluff was all on the surface. He used to take his glasses down, those granny glasses, and say, 'It's only me'…Those are the moments I treasure.'
The truth of that line really chimed, that life is all about those moments that stay with you, so even if someone or something removes your physical reminders, they can't extinguish your actual memories of cherished lived moments, and it's those, once all is said and done, that sustain until the end. They can never be thrown away.
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