I’m at an estate sale today. The sky is the color of limestone, and the air is lukewarm and sweet. My hands feel dusty and heavy from rummaging through the basement of a man I never knew. I think I will know him someday, though. I’m 90% sure he’s a Christian—or he could just enjoy collecting books written by the former pastor of a church I once attended. Either way, it gives me a heaping measure of hope as I move soundlessly through groups of people who are honestly way too happy to be here. Why are people who come to estate sales so giddy about the whole affair?
My sister was upstairs in the house of this man who, this time last week, was alive and eating cereal and choosing which suspenders to wear every morning. She overheard a couple jabbering to each other as they pawed through piles of clothes.
“Too bad this guy was so big. Some of this stuff is really nice.”
Sure, it’s practical to think this way. But it seemed like a small loss of humanity to me. I think it says a lot about how cheap relationships have become to some people. I pass by total strangers with no curiosity or compassion about who they are or what they are going through. They just didn’t watch where they were going and bumped me in the grocery store. They just didn’t accelerate from that red light fast enough for my liking. We don’t know each other. We don’t care.
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Back at the estate sale, questions started to bustle around in my head like bees. It seemed like his house was just disposed of while it was still all lived-in. Don’t people have wills or something? Did this man have no one to treasure him? Did he have no one to ascribe meaning to the things he had ascribed meaning to?
I first thought of these questions yesterday while at a flea market that my sister refers to as the armpit of our town. My boyfriend and I dug through piles of coffee table books (A Guide to Composting Toilets?), costume jewelry, and pocket knives. But what called to me were boxes upon boxes of medals. Like, army medals. Awards and recognitions that I’m sure represented incredible honor and suffering and victory and loss to someone. And there they were, spread out in front of me, 25¢ or less.
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I found some slide film in the basement of this man’s house. I held them up to the light, these tiny fragments of a mosaic of a life, and let the colors filter through them. There was one of a young couple laughing and embracing on a dock in the summertime. There were slides of a trip abroad somewhere, of an elderly couple standing in front of what I think was a mosque and beaming into the camera. They were beautiful.
This may all seem like a long digression, but I write this primarily to honor the man who used to live in a house on Main Street with a beautiful garden. He was an artist. He had great taste in ties. And, obviously, I don’t know the heart of anyone. But seeing the things he valued—Bibles, books on prayer and Christian living, journals full of sermon notes and child’s drawings—gave me comfort. He’s with the Lord in glory. He’s okay. He is more okay than I have ever been. What grace! I am not the one who needs comforting—but it was still given to me today.
In the end, I bought a sweater. It’s thick and cable-knit, the color of the pine forests in Maine. I’ll try to give it new life. And maybe someday I’ll be able to tell this older brother who went ahead of me about it.