I was on hour two of sorting, shredding and bagging years of my husband’s personal military files when it hit me . . . I was shredding away a big part of his life. His head was down in deep concentration next to me, as he quickly read over the papers in front of him. His mind determined, his task simple; shred, keep, or think about it. Mine was doing the same as I looked at every piece of paper he discarded. I’ll be honest, I pulled things that I felt were historically acceptable to keep. Others, I wanted our children to see. After all, they weren’t always around to see their dad shine in his career.
I don’t believe many people think about what they are doing, as they tear through their old file cabinets or desk drawers in an attempt to declutter their offices or homes. Those old tax returns measure one’s success monetarily over the course of a lifetime. Those personal letters of thank you represent the charity of your life. The countless speeches hold hidden stories within them, too precious to discard. The medical records display a life of growth, illness, recovery and resilience. It all provides a tangible record of a life that was lived.
When we finished my husband’s files, I moved out to the garage and tackled the family file drawers. There were treasures hidden within each file of the four door cabinet. Photos of the children slipped into letters, school papers with personal notes from teachers, awards, color pages once coveted by me, from a child excited to show me a circle they had drawn. Old college papers, yellowed by time, slowed the process down, but I found myself walking down memory lane. It was a fast walk, unfortunately, as I was in a garage in Arizona. But I found myself smiling at the “first house” paperwork; remembering how we had saved and used every penny we had to buy it. I found myself recalling our first computer, a Dell, and wondered what had happened to the company. I discovered the applications to colleges by the kids, and smiled thinking about how they had ended up at their particular schools. Their first tax returns slipped out of a separate file, and it reminded me of their first jobs. As I enjoyed most of what I was finding, I reluctantly turned to the shredder and slipped these items into its jaws, knowing only I would be silly enough to think I was shredding away our lives.
But the truth is, we can’t keep everything. We take with us within in our brains, the most important impactful events, people and experiences in our lives. We guard these memories like they are gold, too precious to let fade. And that’s how it should be. But the next time you stop to clean out your files, stop for just a moment and remind yourself to enjoy your “tangible life evidence.” Take a second to store a happy memory, take a photo of something you want to share, and then let it go. Let it go, so that you can fill those cabinets up with many more years of papers – proving you were here, that you lived, you loved, you lived a life worth living.
