What is it about toothbrushes?
what we keep
Getting ready for work Tuesday morning, two toothbrushes by the sink
My sister helps me throw away an eight year old pile of clothes moldering in my garage. It is completely disgusting. Objectively, it is garbage. And I also know, as well as I know anything, that it would still be here but for my sister and that I could not have thrown it out alone.
It does not start as garbage; it starts as clothes to be donated. Clothes and shoes the kids have outgrown, worn things I am tired of, things I convince Mike he does not need. There are, I think, two garbage bags full of clothes under the clothes on top, and they may have been tied by my husband’s own hand. I really don’t remember. The pile starts when we move into the house. 2016. No one takes them to Goodwill, even though Mike separately loves to go to Goodwill. Even though we both go there once to drop off our old couch.
Mike dies and I add to the pile. I cry when a blue oxford shirt gets a stain on it and I can’t wear it anymore. I remember when I bought it…when I needed to dress nicely to visit two law firms and the ACLU. I was still in school. I had just met Mike.
It is in the garbage because my sister points out - correctly - that everything in that pile has become garbage. We don gloves (by some miracle I can find them) and trash all of it. I want to save Mike’s boot - why is it in there? - but I know this is why I am doing this now and why I need help. I do not need to reminisce over the blue Oxford or that pair of Sariah’s pants she outgrew when she was nine. Or the boot.
It all goes, and somehow I am not even sad about this. I marvel at the room in the garage now, how I can get to the pilot without tripping over the mound of clothes that in my mind, had simply become part of the garage.
I read this, on Instagram. The author, happy.grieving, is thirty, and mourning her dad:
his toothbrush is no longer just a toothbrush
It’s the last toothbrush he will ever use, still standing by the sink as though he might return for it. I can’t bring myself to throw it away. The act feels too final, like I’m cementing the reality of his death. Letting it go would mean accepting that he’s truly gone - and I’m not ready for that. - happy.grieving
She asks, at the end, What did you keep? and people answer. Lots of people keep toothbrushes. What is it about toothbrushes? But they also keep jackets, body wash, wallets, clothes that had to be cut off at the hospital. And…everything. Everything is a common answer and mostly it is mine too, moldering clothes notwithstanding. The ones in the closet are exactly where he left them, even the out of style gray sweater I never saw him wear. The clothes are the tip of the iceberg. I kept everything. Keep everything.
But I think about the toothbrushes specifically and why people keep them. I think the answer is this: They keep them because they can. Keeping everything is a privilege, and I am not alone in this. Some people move everything, and keep it locked away in a room they never enter. Some people leave everything where it was, museum style, which is kind of how our closet is. But we can’t all do this. Many people need to move, out of monetary or psychological necessity. Some possessions are competition. I was recently at a funeral where everyone wanted Grandma’s ring, had started angling for it before she died, even.
You know what I’ve never seen anyone fight over? Grandma’s toothbrush. I suppose it may have happened before in the history of ever, but people mostly fight over items that are either worth something in money dollars or have tremendous sentimental value. And sometimes you, the widow, the bereaved mom, the daughter with a dead dad, need to sell items out of necessity. I like to tell people I have two cars because I am a princess. It’s a little true, because I am one person with two cars. They are also nine and fifteen years old, and selling one of them never seemed like a long-term solution to me, even when money was tight. You can’t sell it again, after all, when you need money again. They also have different purposes, and the pilot is a beast in the snow. But mostly, I keep it because my husband drove it.
But you can’t sell a toothbrush, unless it belonged to Taylor Swift or something. You can’t sell dad’s toothbrush or Mike’s toothbrush, or Grandma’s. You can take it or save it, even when you have room to save almost nothing else. There is only one reason to save a toothbrush.
Love.
You only save the toothbrush of someone you love. It has no value or real utility beyond that. For me it is not the finality of getting rid of it, not really. I don’t think Mike would go anywhere even if I tossed his toothbrush directly in the trash. He might even think I should. It’s mostly that I don’t want to let go of anything he ever touched, looked at, or breathed on. Everything he drove and everything he wore. Some of it will eventually go, like the pile of clothes and the window seat that’s no longer in our bedroom. But why get rid of a toothbrush that takes up so little room in the cup that would be there anyway? The cup with two toothbrushes says there is still an us.
I am not done loving him. In three days, it will be ten years since he first messaged me, ten years of love. On Valentine’s Day, I deliberately go to an Irish pub that leans more toward sports bar than cozy/romantic. I know I will be able to sit down at the last minute, because this is not where you take your lover on Valentine’s Day. But I think about this:
Mike on the phone from jail, in October, apologizing that he was not out to make a Valentine’s Day dinner reservation. I would need to do it. I think I might have laughed at him. I had never heard of making a reservation so early. “All the good places will be taken,“ he says. So I look up romantic restaurants in Denver and book one, and think how my ex-husband always wanted to eat at a non-romantic place where no one would want to go. He did not consider me worth making a reservation for, in October or on February 13.
Mike loved me enough to make reservations for Valentine’s Day in October. And I love him enough to keep his toothbrush…and pretty much everything else.