‘Life is Changed, Not Ended’

My father once gave me a great piece of advice when I was facing a difficult task.

“Better behind you than in front of you,” he said.

That little saying has been so helpful to me over the years and I will always grateful to my father for passing it along.

So, it seemed appropriate that on this Father’s Day weekend, I should take on a chore I've had in front of me for an honest-to-God decade.

I decided that I was going to clean out…the Box.

The Box is this cardboard monstrosity brimming with all sorts of random stuff—books, paper, and a lot of extension cords, for some reason--that has been festering in a corner of my computer room ever since I moved here 10 years ago.

The thing was supposed to be a temporary fix, just a way of transporting a lot of loose items out of my old address.

My plan was to quickly review and properly sort all of the Box’s contents as soon as I got settled in my new digs.

That was in 2011.

Every weekend I would tell myself, this is it, I can’t look at that four-sided millstone any longer; I’m cleaning that bastard out and giving it a hostile heave-ho.

And every weekend, I didn’t.

Strangely enough, the COVID-19 pandemic helped push me into action. It wasn’t so much the additional time on my hands due to the quarantine as it was the societal shift to online video.

I’ve been attending my most beloved writing class via Zoom for over a year now and I quickly realized that Box was no longer just an atrocity in my life. It had now gone public.

I’d be reading my work or listening to my classmates and I’d see the corrugated paper putz looming over my shoulder like a wingless vulture.

Taunting me, mocking me, flipping me a phantom finger.

In addition to the shame factor, I was also fresh out of excuses.

I had absolutely no plans this weekend and the weather report for Saturday bit the big one.

“…Against the Armed Enemy…”

The time was now. The Box had to be destroyed.

This turned out to be a real chore, both physically and emotionally. I found all sorts of random papers, including several birthday and holiday cards from my parents that brought tears to my eyes.

It’s incredible how these little Hallmark ditties take on an entirely new meaning when the people who sent them to you are no longer around.

I found some of my mother’s ceramic works, including her Little Girl with The Curl sculpture that now has a place on honor on my kitchen table.

But I made one of the most amazing discoveries inside a simple manila folder. They were just three sheets of paper, but they had so much to say.

Two were citations from the U.S. Army. One noted the Bronze Star my father had received “for meritorious achievement in ground combat”; and the other marks the Purple Heart my dad had won for wounds suffered in action on November 3, 1944.

And the third piece of paper was the program for my father’s funeral on January 11, 2007.

I looked at those two dates and thought all the things that had happened between them.

My father returned from the war, reentered society, got a job as a salesman, met and married and my mother and raised four children.

The funeral mass program includes the quote, “Lord, for your faithful people, life is changed, not ended.”

I like the sound of that.

The computer room clean-up is far from over, but I feel like I’ve made tremendous progress.

The Box is now history, torn to shreds and bound by cord, its mortal remains are sitting outside my door waiting for the sanitation workers on Tuesday.

I’m going to get proper frames for my father’s citations and a good plastic covering for the funeral program.

And I want to take care of this as soon as possible.

Like my father said, better behind me than in front of me.