Bottle Caps

One of the most emotionally exhausting things is missing things about Julie that annoyed me when she was alive. This immediately leads to a feeling that I wasted some of our relationship. Now the opportunity has gone forever. All aboard the train of grief and self-loathing.

One of those things was her tendency to fill the house with clutter. She always did this, but I think it got worse as the brain tumor progressed. Over the last few years, she collected everything from wine corks, to wine bottles, to the cardboard tubes in paper towels and toilet paper. It wasn’t really hoarding. Our walkways were never in danger and it wasn’t compulsive. She just liked having that stuff, I think mostly as a vehicle to fantasize about crafts she’d like to do.

She knew that I found the saving of cardboard tubes irritating and so when she would find an empty paper-towel roll, she would grab the tube and, to the tune of a Viking horn, she would sing “Card-board TUUUBE, Card-board TUUUBE.” I would chase her or otherwise give her a hard time, and then the tube would go in the box. We have a box containing about 40 of them.

Yesterday, I threw out an ashtray full of bottle caps, and now I feel guilty and sad about it. There was no ritual around the saving of bottle caps. I can’t remember the last time she talked about making a bottle cap mosaic on a table (that was the plan). Nevertheless, I still find myself longing for the bottle caps to be back in the ashtray.

I know that this is just grief by proxy. I know that I could not have been the sort of person that shared Pinterest boards with crafting ideas with her anymore than she could have been a member of one of my bands. I know it annoyed her that the music was too loud at band practice, but I never felt unloved or misunderstood or wished for a better mate. I know she didn’t either (at least not because of this kind of stuff…).

My problem is that I want to love her some more, and she’s not here. The hurt from that goes hunting for someplace to attach and finds these moments in my memory. That hurt is not ever going to heal. Eventually, I will get used to it, in much the same way that I am now accustomed to the embarrassment of forgetting familiar people’s names when I have to introduce them.