When cleaning out my dad’s condo, I found an envelope on which my dad had scrawled a date and the number 32. The date was fairly recent, something like April 24, 2014.
But the 32…
What could it mean?
It is a unique emotion that fills one when sorting through a dead man’s belongings. Part macabre curiosity and part hopeful rummaging, one flits through piles of stuff in a quest for a kernel of understanding about the deeper parts of a person, a clue to explain away a recent and unexpected decline, a spark to fire memories long lost,
Did the stack of financial documents piled atop the pool table suggest that my dad was anticipating and preparing for the end?
Did the fact that my painting of a cowboy had been replaced by a mirror mean that my dad and I still had tension between us when he fell ill?
Did the pile of 17 Swiss Army knives strewn across his ottoman imply that his compulsive cuticle trimming and nail cutting had reached debilitating levels?
Did the pages from various photo albums strewn about have some sort of order that could explain how my dad’s mind was working and what he was remembering in those last days?
Were they good thoughts?
Were they happy? Were true?
Were they about me? My sisters? My brothers? My kids? My wife?
His sister? His mother? His father?
Our family?
Or were they darker? Confused? Lost?
Alone?
And so I opened the envelope and found…
…his tooth, root still intact, wrapped in a note stating that this particular tooth was number 32.
And that is when I realized stuff is stuff, a missing paintings is just painting, and a pile of knives are simply knives. There is no insight to be gleaned, no deep character key to be found and understood, no real way to get at what my dad was feeling or thinking.
For a tooth is nothing more than a tooth.