Life after cancer

I have been cleaning the garage out. It is hard work. Not the physical part; I have recovered enough for that. What to do with the “stuff”? That is the difficult part. Is it recyclable? No, yes, maybe? Is it hazardous?  Those questions are tougher. Then the hardest. Do I really want to get rid of this. I have had it 30, 40 years. Or since I moved to Arizona in 1966. As in the backpack I donated just the other day. And then there is the inherited family stuff.

I never did well with my family of origin. It is too bad that I never realized that until later my life. The first clue I had was in the late 1970s. I was in the midst of a divorce which I did not want, working on a field assignment in California. I came to visit Phoenix and stayed with my parents. One day I mentioned something to my father in what I supposed was in confidence. Then I overheard him tell my mother what I had said. Later my mother repeated it to my brother.

Ah, so that is how it is. I thought. I realized then that that was always how it was. Years later, I connected the dots and thought about how this came about.

At my birth my father was in the Army Air Corps and stationed in South Carolina. Shortly after my birth my mother left me with her adoptive parents (in Salt Lake Utah, where I was born) and joined my father. They returned to Utah more than a year later with my brother (born 13 months after me in South Carolina). In us humans the first year is critical for bonding. I was never part of that family.

They are all gone now and some odd 80 years later I have some stuff. Most notably a steamer trunk with mementos, pictures and letters from the long dead. Of particular note is one letter to my mother mailed in 1958. The letter mentions Harry and Nora, who I lived with for the first year of my life. But the letter isn’t signed and I can’t figure out who the hell wrote it.

Before cancer I don’t think that would have bothered me so.