I sat upon the floor of the apartment. Around me, half-empty boxes and a box on contractor bags are strewn about in no particular order.
There’s a couple of bottles of liquid courage not too far away, just in case I need a little help to get done what needs getting done.
You see, one of the hardest parts of being the clean-up crew of somebody who is deceased is the inevitable trespassing you will have to do. A lot of people volunteered to help me, and I humbly turned them down. I knew that, as well as I knew my brother, there was going to be some stuff that I would have little, if any, knowledge of. The even harder part was trying to determine how to select this from that.
I don’t think you could ever imagine how brutally stressful this was on me. The first step was the clean-up. I really don’t want to get into specifics, but there was clean-up. Again, people argued with me. “You don’t need to do that.” I understood where they were coming from, but in reality, I had to. We hadn’t found a note at this point, and if there was going to be one found, I wanted to be the one to find it. I had only been in the apartment one time previous with a police escort as the apartment was sealed, so this was a pretty tough moment for me.
I walked around and tried to take in any clues I could. There wasn’t any. Outside of the mess the EMS made when they went in, there was little to any indication that anything was out of the ordinary (if you could call my situation “ordinary”).
I took pictures of the whole apartment before I started, mostly to have for reference if I needed them at a later date. After that was done, I went on an intense search. I don’t know what it is about finding a note or leaving a note. I don’t think it would have helped the situation anymore, but you watch so much TV and hear so many stories, you just sort of find yourself following suit.
I opened drawers, laptops, notebooks, anything on top. I was assuming if David left anything, it would be semi-hidden, and he would have expected it was me coming into the apartment. So I looked in very David-typical places. Suffice to say that I looked high and low, and there was never a note to be found.
Once it was determined there wasn’t anything to be found, I went to the kitchen and grabbed cleaning supplies. David was very much a germaphobic, so he had these industrial strength kitchen gloves for doing dishes, which allowed him to use close to boiling water to clean his stuff. I threw those on and grabbed some bleach and that kind of stuff and, from there, began to remove the traces of his actions over a week before.
What sucked for me was having to jump through the hurdles of the court system, and when one of the court appointees quipped back, “Why do you need this access so badly?” I was near wit’s end and was like, “Because it’s a suicide scene that hasn’t been cleaned up for over a week.” That shut her up real quick, and my access was granted. But it was yet another one of those circumstances where not only are you in this shit place, but then you have to use this even shittier situation and retort to get what you need to get done.
Cleaning up was not as awful as one would imagine it to be. I spent more time sort of going through what you will continue to go through for the rest of your life, asking yourself, “WHY?”
Once I was able to get all that cleaned up and into bags, the real hard part began.
The complete and absolute breach of my brother’s privacy.
I had to open every drawer, every nook and cranny of his life, and begin categorizing, prioritizing, and sorting his life into little bins. “Keep.” “Chuck.” “Don’t know.” Clothing was mostly easy. Outside of the things people requested, most everything either had a home or a Salvation Army pile.
It was only when I got into the safe and into a Tupperware bin under his bed that the absolute breach of privacy really began. Little notes and pictures from grade school to as recently as the days leading up. Photos of people I never knew, love letters in kid’s handwriting from middle school. Familiar faces of people we lost in the past, or kids in a picture who are grown now and are friends of mine. Birthday cards and break-up notes. The Tupperware container held the things David held most dear, and to me they were just scraps. While in some ways you want to hold onto everything, I just didn’t have any association with those things, and really at this point, my apartment was still unpacked from my move. To drag any additional items would only add to the clutter.
But it tore me to pieces, scrap by scrap and piece by piece that I was throwing away these items that held such importance to him and his legacy. But since it had no Rosetta Stone to decipher the moment in time, they were going to become part of the landfill and vanish into thin air.
There was a grip of keys, like 50 keys on a key-chain belonging to locks unknown. Each little piece with its own back story, mute to me, but likely would have drawn a plethora of stories had David been in the room with me.
Eventually I was able to sort it down to only three car rides worth of stuff, which I would then lug up six flights of stairs knowing I would have to do this again. The bittersweet was the stuff I had given him that he had decided to keep in that box: my wedding invite to him, or a letter I had written to him when I lived out west, or a birthday card, or a “Get well soon!” note, or a picture I had given him of us when we were kids… I was warmed and frozen simultaneously.
I could go on for paragraphs, but the entire time, I was the court-appointed steward of his effects. In the end, more than 90% either found its way to Goodwill or the inside of a contractor’s bag.
I wonder what secrets I inadvertently threw away over the next several months. I wonder what stories will forever be lost in the void. Most of all, I felt ashamed for having had to breach his personal life so aggressively and simplistically. All those years spent collecting little tidbits and tokens that make up a person’s life… simply cataloged, evaluated, and either saved or chucked.
It will happen to us at some point—there really is no protection against it. But it made me take stock of my own personal life. I thought to myself, “This morning, if anything ever happened to me, who would be my steward of privacy? And what do my “things” say about me? What do I keep near and dear, and who would really know the deep meaning behind the smallest things?”
I trespassed because I had to. It’s not something I would like to do again anytime soon.
