Saturday
You never think about the toothbrush.
In all those sleepless nights when you imagine the unimaginable, when your mind rehearses the phone call or the hospital room or the quiet morning when you'll find her still, you think about the big things. The funeral arrangements. The relatives to call. The house that will echo differently. The holidays that will taste like ash. You think about her laugh disappearing from the world, about never again hearing her say your name in that particular way that meant you were loved before you even drew breath.
But you never think about the toothbrush.
It sits there in the medicine cabinet for weeks after, sometimes months—this small, worn thing with frayed bristles that knew the intimate geography of her mouth. Pink plastic, maybe blue, unremarkable in every way except that it was hers. You walk past the bathroom door and catch a glimpse of it through the mirror, and it stops you cold because suddenly you understand that this object, this nothing thing, outlasted her.
The toothbrush doesn't know she's gone. It waits with the patience of the inanimate for her to return for the morning teeth brushing ritual of foam and spit and rinse that will never come again. There's something so tragic about loyalty and a readiness to serve a mouth that has spoken its last words.
You'll stand there holding it one random Sunday when you're finally cleaning out the medicine cabinet. Such a light thing. Weightless, really. But somehow it contains the full gravity of loss—all those mornings she stood exactly where you're standing, half-awake, running water, existing in the small, unremarkable ways that constitute a life.
The devastation isn't in the death. The devastation is in the endless after, in the archaeology of an ordinary life. It's her reading glasses folded on the nightstand, still holding the shape of her face. It's the half-used tube of hand cream that smells like her, that you can't bring yourself to finish because then there will be one less thing in the world that her fingers touched.
It's her handwriting on the grocery list still magnetted to the refrigerator: "milk, bread, bananas/ripe" (you know those are only for when you visit because she hates them-therefore ripe). Such careful specifications for a future she wouldn't see. You learn that grief lives in the margins of things. In the way her coffee mug sits clean and unused in the cabinet, waiting. In her slippers by the door, toes still curved to the shape of her feet. In the bookmark, placed optimistically on page 247 of a mystery she'll never solve.
The day you finally throw away the toothbrush—and you will, eventually, because you have to—you'll understand something terrible about love. You'll understand that it lives in these small, forgettable things that you never thought to memorize. The way she hummed tunelessly while brushing her teeth. The tap-tap-tap against the sink to shake off excess water. The precise spot where she set it down each night.
All of it gone into a wastebasket. All of it ordinary until it's irreplaceable.
The great cruelty of loss isn't that it takes the person. The great cruelty is that it leaves behind this debris of intimacy, these small proofs of how thoroughly someone existed in the world. Her favorite pen, still warm somehow with the memory of her grip. The indent in her pillow that held the weight of her dreams. The way she organized the spice rack. A man learns to carry these small devastations in his chest like splinters. The way her purse still smells like peppermints and worry. The way her address book, written in her careful script, becomes a catalog of people who don't yet know they've lost her. The way her last grocery run yielded a refrigerator full of food she'll never eat, including that carton of milk dated two weeks into a future where she wouldn't need calcium for bones that would no longer carry her. But it's that toothbrush that breaks you. Because it's so unassuming in its vigil. Because it expected nothing more than to be useful, to serve in the small ceremony of daily maintenance that keeps a human being tethered to the world. Because when you finally wrap your fingers around it you realize that you're holding the last witness to her most ordinary moments.
And you understand this is a small reckoning. Because throwing it away means admitting that the ordinary world will now be her absence. That life has moved on to new toothbrushes, new morning routines, new ways of being that don't include the particular way she worried about her teeth or hummed Amy Grant songs getting ready for days she thought would never end. The trash in her trash can waits. The toothbrush weighs nothing and is the heaviest weight you've ever held
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
