All that remains

I've finally, after nine months, come into possession of the three cardboard boxes that are all that remain of my brother's possessions.

The man whose property Casey lived and worked on packed up anything small enough to ship to us and sent it by Canada Post last summer. The rest he sold and used the money to pay Casey's final expenses. Since the boxes arrived at my father's house in Kitchener, they have sat in a cupboard in his basement. I would have had them at Christmastime if a bad cold had not forced me to cancel my travel plans. I finally made it down there last week and brought the boxes back with me, where they sat for the last week until I managed to cart two of them up here to my apartment. The last one, the biggest, is still in my car. Goodness knows what's in it.

Most of the contents of these first two boxes are computer games and movies. There was a huge 18" flashlight and a hardhat he must have used on the job. A cloth cap with "Casey's Bar and Grill" I'd sent him a couple of years ago. I haven't come across the Senators cap I sent him yet. Probably won't. A small portable DVD movie player, and his laptop.

I was nervous about going into the laptop. My brother being a single man for most of his life, I had this idea that there might be some unsavory stuff on his computer. But I was wrong. There was little on there but computer games. The only photos I found were family photos, pictures of his dog and the horses where he lived, a bunch of pics of my father's carvings. I was really touched by this. Seeing pictures of myself there, as a child and an adult, some of them with Casey, and pictures of my artwork he'd taken off my old website made me realize, for real, that Casey was an intensely sentimental man who loved and missed his family back here in Ontario. We knew that about him when he was still alive, but somehow, seeing those photos on his computer really made it hit home for me. It must have been so hard for him to accept that the best place for him was out there in BC, even though all the people he loved most in the world were so very far away.

Other things I found were his ID in a battered but beautiful old leather wallet with a Harley Davidson-style logo embossed on the front, from a company called Milwaukee Iron Motorcycles. His drivers licence, social insurance, bank card, health card...all that stuff was in there. For some reason he had two birth certificates. It was weird looking at those things. Of all the stuff in those boxes, those things made me feel like I should stop and return it all. This isn't my stuff. There's a strange sense of something halted. An abruptness about it. And I guess that makes sense, considering how sudden and unexpected his death was.

There was also a little candy tin filled with cancelled stamps he'd collected, and another small cookie tin filled with pennies and nickels. An old 8x10 photo of our Nana I must have taken and printed while in college. There is, surprisingly, a Bible among his possessions. It seems old, but not much used, and I suspect that, like me, Casey felt that all homes should own a bible, whether you ever read it or not.

There's even a soapstone carving I think he must have done himself. A wonky letter K (his initial, for Kenneth), with the letters "KC" inscribed on one side. It won't stand up properly. I think maybe he was just messing around, trying to be like his dad, carving something, being artistic like the rest of the family. In a way, this is the most personal thing I've come across so far.

I thought I'd find it upsetting to go through Casey's things like this. All the reminders of a person who was, and who is no more. Someone who was, to a great extent, a stranger to me. The regrets I feel, for him, and for myself, I thought would flood back. But they didn't (although they are now, as I write this). As I took each item from the box I just felt a kind of bittersweet pleasure at seeing the little things that would have sat around him in his home. I felt a tad sheepish looking into his notebooks and his wallet and his computer, where I might have encountered very personal, private things. But I never did. It's like Casey was a child still, with a child's concerns and interests, a child's drives and a child's need to be loved by his family.

It makes me love him and miss him that much more, wishing I'd known these things about him while he still lived so I might at least have expressed my feelings to him...just so he would know.

It's a little disturbing that there's so little left of a person after a life of 45 years. Just a few paltry possessions, probably worth less than the money it cost to ship them to us. My grandparents left just as little behind them also. I have my grandmother's hope chest, an old blown-glass ashtray she used every day and an old, beautifully framed photo of my great-grandmother - Nana's mother - that had hung over the dresser in what used to be Nana's room at her home in Smith's falls. I don't think I have anything left that belonged to my grandfather. I doubt there was any money left to their children, and if there was, it was probably spent on their funerals and nursing home expenses.

So little left of a life. Nothing left to tell the future that they existed except the memories that remain with those of us who knew them...and soon enough, those will be gone also.