March 4th, 2025
What do you do when you want to organize something physical? How do you organize it? Why do you organize it? Where does it go when it is done?
For me, this is my current situation. Or at least, I am at the tail end of it. Due to a family situation, involing the death of a loved one, I am currently in the process of packing things away. The house that I have lived in for half of my life has to be cleaned and emptied for potential buyers by the middle of the month.
This fact is very personal to me, and I doubt anybody would care. The grief of dealing with both of these subjects is rather sad, but not entirely important. But what i wanted to talk about today is my act of organization over the past three weeks; as, in a burst of motivation and clarity, I was given the task of organizing the decades of family pictures. I would seperate them based on each family member, and give the final result to their respective parties.
In some way, I am rather proud of my accomplishment, as without my deed these pictures would have been thrown away; par from a few pictures that would have been cherry picked over the course of the previous month. But today, as I was in the middle of finishing up my duties, I started to think more about the plastic bags that I used to physically organize the pictures into catagories.
I felt as though I was tearing apart my family; seperating them into ziploc bags that held no connection. It was a situation that was playing out in real time, and it's something that I can't really control. The memories in the minds of my family will live for the rest of our lives; but these plastic bags represents a sense of mortality that I have been dwelling a lot on ever since this started.
Those plastic bags will probably last a lot longer than I will.
I lied in my third paragraph.