THE ATTIC

As you climb the stairs to the old attic, your nostrils fill with a familiar old smell—that sweet, stuffy smell of the integration of people's lives and the passage of time. Blended aromas of all the families who lived in the old house, each leaving their mark, their unique scent, be it from the food they cooked or the soap they used. And somehow attics give refuge to the past better than any other section of a house. 

You look at the boxes stacked against the attic walls. Boxes containing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of memories - photos, letters, diplomas with tassels, report cards, dried flowers from prom night, wedding invitations, birthday cards, sympathy cards, birth announcements, and all the other assorted memorabilia. Remanents of lives either well-lived or not so well-lived. Lives that ended way too soon, and lives that went on several years past their due date. Lives that were happy and those that were sad. Lives that experienced enormous success and those that seem to experience nothing but disappointment.

Much of the contents belonged to your immediate family, but, in some cases, the stored memories were of people you barely knew, and some you never met; distant aunts, uncles, and cousins. You stared at the challenge ahead of you, feeling a mixture of dread and anger. "Why me," you kept repeating to yourself. "Why me."

Over the last five years, you've buried your mother and three siblings, and yesterday, your father was laid to rest, leaving you as the sole survivor of a once highly spirited and fun-loving family. And now it will fall upon you to bury hundreds of family memories, memories of a beloved father and mother, two brothers, and sister. You try not to think of the unfairness of it all or the survivor's guilt you have felt so intensely since losing your youngest sister. At times the guilt is so gut wrenching and painful that you wish, with all your heart, that God had taken you and not your young and vivacious beautiful sister. In the depths of your despair, you search for reasons 'why,' only to discover there is no answer to that question. At least no answer that will calm and give comfort to your soul. There is only the cold hard reality of what happened, and you have slowly come to understand that one either accepts it or spends their life struggling to understand that which is beyond human understanding.

Now the burden of sorting through the lives of those no longer with us falls upon you. If only you had some help with this overwhelming task. After all, there were four of you, two girls and two boys. And this monumental chore was supposed to be a shared experience. Children should not die before their parents, and the oldest child should not be the only surviving child. It is not supposed to work that way, but it did, and now you are faced with discarding all the memories, the footprint of their lives. Memories that at some point meant a great deal to them. So much so that they wrapped them with love and placed in a box for safekeeping. 

You assemble a few empty boxes and labeled one "trash" the other "donations." As you open the first box and view the contents, tears come to your eyes. There before you wrapped in an old white sheet was a sailor's uniform. The uniform your father wore during WWII. The same uniform that saw American troops land in North Africa, Italy, and on Omaha Beach. Next to the uniform were your father's medals. Among them a Bronz Star, and a Purple Heart. Suddenly the enormity of your task was more than you could bear. How could you throw such sacrifice, bravery, and duty in the trash? You wondered where all the other thousands of WWII uniforms were? Thrown away or still housed in a box deep in the corner of some attic? 

Overcome with emotion, you descended the attic stairs running for the back door. Throwing it open and stepping onto the back porch. You needed air, fresh air that would expel that stuffy attic from your lungs. How were you going to go through all those boxes when the first box you encountered put you in tears and sent you running from the past? Where would you find the strength to discard the treasures of another's heart. Where would you find the strength to discard the treasures of your own heart?

Sitting on the back porch memories flooded your consciousness. The smell of your mother's cherry pie, your father's pipe tobacco, the Barbie Doll your sister insisted on sleeping with, your brothers proudly dressed out in their new baseball uniforms, of the family dog sunning herself just a few feet from where you now stood. Once, you were so anxious to leave all that behind but now found yourself wishing those days had never ended. For it seemed like when they ended, the goodbyes started, and the funerals began. And now the ultimate goodbye; the task of tossing out the past. 

You spent the next three days sorting, donating, and throwing away those items whose time had come to an end, at least in your life. And during those three days, not one emotion bypassed you. Running the gauntlet of intense sadness to uncontrollable laughter, but in the end, your soul felt cleansed. Letting go of the past lifted a thousand-pound weight from your shoulders. The weight of the physical, of possessions. Of photos rarely viewed, of letters and cards that lost their meaning years ago, of baseball cards and Barbie Doll clothes. 

You locked the door to the old house, leaving the key under the mat for the new owner. It was a beautiful summer day for walking, and the train station was only a few blocks away. You carried two small bags. One held your personal belongings, and in the other was a Bronz Star, a Purple Heart, and a sailor's uniform.