Michael Palin is going through the same thing I went through and is dealing with it in the same way.
Michael Palin has heartbreakingly admitted that his late wife Helen Gibbins’ clothes are still hanging ‘in the cupboard’ as they make it feel as if she was ‘still here’.
It took me two years to finally carry out the late Mrs L’s wishes and divvy up her jewellery among her nieces. In fact, I didn’t. Two of those nieces came over and did the necessary. It was a year later before my sisters came over and emptied the wardrobe and put everything in black bags ready for the charity shop. I put them into a cupboard and shut the door for another three years. It was only with another partner moving in that I finally dealt with it and took those bags to a clothes bank. We have finally decorated the house in another colour scheme, leaving me feeling that she is really gone.
The new paramour wanted to paint all the rooms downstairs in one colour, whereas I wanted to keep the same contrasting style that the late Mrs L liked. We compromised. I did two rooms my way and two rooms her way – she got the upstairs and I got the downstairs. That way, there is a shade of what went before, that means something to me. The colours are more muted, so different, but the style remains with each plane a contrast to the other – in pale grey and white. It works. Even Mrs L elect admitted that despite the extra work involved, it does look good.
My father on the other hand, redecorated and cleared out within weeks of my mother’s death. We had very differing ways of dealing with it. Mine is more like Palin’s.
So, yes, I get it.
The late Mrs P’s dressing gown hung on my bathroom door for a decade. The last gift I bought her – a handbag – is in the back of my wardrobe still — 13 years on. My mum has left all dad’s stuff in place. Yet her mum – my grandmother – had a “Viking funeral” response to granddad’s death. There was no trace of him left. Grief varies in style if not intensity.
When the Mrs. Galt returned to Satan, I cleared out the entire house and recycled most of it. The only thing I kept were my books and CD’s.
I guess it depends how positive their influence was on the survivor.
Could be, unless some kind of Stockholm Syndrome has set in, or the survivor’s personality has been completely subsumed by the departed. When my mom was finally free of my father, she became him, even to doing all the crazy things he did that she quietly rebelled against when he was alive. She said many times that she married him because she felt sorry for him (both were married late in life), so there was no love lost there. Like in arranged marriages, I guess people get used to the other, and wish to recreate familiar circumstances even if one of them has died.